Posts

My phone calls

Image
12:59 The phone ringing beside my bed startled me out of a deep sleep. The nurse on medicine was calling for bed 8, a teenage boy who had been admitted several days prior with a hemoglobin of 3.9 in the setting of an unknown bleeding disorder. Apparently the boy would periodically have nosebleeds at home throughout his life that somehow his family had previously managed to stop. Hemophilia A? B? Von Willebrand disease? Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangectasia? We will never know in this country. I found him laying on the ground with the nasal tampon in his R nare that I had placed 2 days prior and blood steadily dripping from his L nare now. He was snarfing and crying. I shoved a new nasal tampon in the other nare and blew it up as much as he could tolerate. Then I turned to the father and asked how many bags of blood his son had received since admission. He sheepishly looked around, and I turned to the nurse who reported he had still only gotten the one bag of blood we gave him from
1 comment
Read more

Two ladies

Image
Gabriel’s first blog!!!   Two little girls came to the hospital today. I saw the first one being extracted from her mom’s womb. The team tried to wake her up, get her to breath, b ut it never happened. She did not breath the air of this world. She will never suffer abuse from her peers, or need to forgive or be forgiven. Babys are born fine, no guilty or sin attached, heaven will be full of babies. The second girl, a young school girl, just arrived in the hospital, bleeding profusely from her vagina. The family claims it was caused by an insect, the doctor just told the nurse that the little girl was probably raped. They often have these stories. Hopefully the police can be called if they find evidence. Even if forgiveness happens, its scars will remain forever. Two ladies were the ones mistreated and verbally assaulted by an angry hospital worker. Now the disrespectful yelling was happening in front of my house’s porch. This attitude is unacceptable and if we don’t do anything I might
1 comment
Read more

Companion

Image
  Companion Hurry, hurry, were we going to make it in time? Hurry, hurry, she had been pushing for several hours before I received a call from the night nurse on maternity that the fetal head was no longer advancing.  Hurry, hurry, call the mechanician to start the generator, call the nurse anesthetist to do the spinal, call the nurse to first assist. Hurry, hurry, get her IVs in, fluid running, labs drawn, foley placed, abdomen scrubbed. Make the cuts, get the baby out, stop the bleeding. Sew the layers, oh wow, were we going to make it in time? Hurry, hurry! The moment I finished closing the fascia, I turned the needle driver over to my assist and fled the OR as fast as I could. I wasn’t sure if it was the vomit or the diarrhea I felt welling up inside of me who would win. Hurry! Hurry! As fast as I could, I hobbled home to the toilet that would be a close companion for the next few days. Illnesses are ever pressing close to us here. Thankfully, since doctors usually make horrible pa
1 comment
Read more

To understand

Image
  His cry pierced the silence of the night. At that time, several months ago, our little son Elijah was normally sleeping through the night. I waited a minute, but his cries did not abate, and so I pulled him out of his tent pitched at the end of our bed. Instantly, I knew he was warm, too warm even for a humid night in rainy season in Chad.  I nudged Gabriel awake, and he found the thermometer. 39 degrees Celsius. Fever. My baby has a fever. And I’m in Chad. Warning bells went off in my head and fear gripped my heart. I had known this day would come, I knew sooner or later he would get malaria. This was his first time, though, and I was nervous.  I slathered his Malarone pill in peanut butter and Gabriel shoved it down his throat. After nursing him, finally he fell back asleep. The next few days were marked by fever, fussiness, and fervent prayers. The majority of local families have lost a child to malaria and even missionary children have died in this land of malaria.  At times I fe
3 comments
Read more

Before their eyes

Image
The day I tried to cook with the moldy garlic was the day we decided I had to switch to the higher prescription glasses I had been refusing to use the last few years. My old scratched and outdated ones just weren’t doing the job for these extremely myopic eyes. They weren’t helpful enough for quickly seeing the apex of a uterine rupture or getting all the little donkey hairs out of the donkey bite wound. Thankfully, though, prior to the switch of my glasses, the old glasses were enough to still see the clear blue eyes of my little strawberry blonde boy who just celebrated his first birthday yesterday. His blue eyes gleam and he lets out a little squeal when he catches sight of something he wants to play with, like the bucket of peanuts or the can opener. Toys have little interest for him these days. But a toy, a very specific toy is just what one little girl wanted. She asked the nurse midwife for a doll. The nurse midwife told me that she herself didn’t have a doll, and she knew I pro
4 comments
Read more

Contrast

Image
  I was exhausted from the previous weeks of figuring out how to take care of both my newly expanded family and all the hospital duties - inpatient medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, urgent and non urgent consultations, ultrasound interpretations, xray interpretations, administrative duties. I wanted a contrast - a contrast from the long nights in the OR trying to stop the flood of blood from a postpartum hemorrhage or in the obstetrics ward watching an oxytocin drip on a patient with stalled labor. The furnace of hot season started blasting forth its fires making both our energy levels    and the glasses on my sweaty face slip off. I wanted a contrast. A contrast from the world of brown - brown dirt, brown skies, a weather forecast that said “dust.” The greatest contrast I could think of from Chad was northern Finland - Lapland. So we left Chad for a three hour tour, or well, in our case, a two week vacation. In a matter of a few flights, we were transported to a world of white - a wor
2 comments
Read more

Under the Mosquito Net

Image
Under the mosquito net Three years ago I received the official “call” to be a missionary doctor in Béré, Chad. Two years ago, my handsome Brazilian boyfriend joined me in Chad for my first month to help me get settled in. One year ago, that handsome Brazilian came back with me as my husband. This year, we brought our little son with us. I would never have imagined, three years ago, how much God would have blessed me as a result of being here. Our little son, Elijah, spends the majority of his time underneath the mosquito net. Sure we take him out for baths and walks, but sleeping, nursing, and playing are most frequently done inside the protective covering of our mosquito nets. (Thank you US government for donating them to this country so that we could buy them in the market for a good price.) Every month that passes, I breath a sigh of relief as he as grown a little older and a little stronger for the time which will inevitably come when he contracts a tropical disease.
2 comments
Read more