Hands

Hands

In this culture, shaking hands is a key interaction between people. I was even accused of yelling at one of the other missionaries because I did not shake his hand. I didn’t actually yell at him, I just didn’t shake his hand and apparently that can be seen as yelling? So I shake hands, a lot of hands - hands swarming with innumerable parasites, viruses and bacteria. If I think too much about it I shiver, but I think in Jesus’ life He shook hands all the time, or whatever the equivalent of shaking hands was in that culture.

Some hands I must shake quickly. I was in the salle de accouchement for another lady, à placental abruption, when the maternity nurse called my attention to her. “Les pieds sont dans la vagin.” I turned my attention to her and confirmed that indeed, there were baby feet in her vagina. She had borne 5 children before this and her labor had progressed so rapidly that she had just arrived to the maternity ward moments before me. 

So I rapidly shook her hand and that of her husband and tried to explain to them in a few seconds the pros and cons of a footling breech vaginal delivery while preparing to take her to the OR should she choose it. The husband became very angry at us that the baby was feet first as if it was our fault that the baby was not head first anymore (or ever, who knows) as the nurses had told them at the last prenatal visit she had attended over a month prior. 

But she progressed too quickly for us to decide, and I guided out the feet and body, and then flipped out the arms. But the head, of course, is the most difficult part of the baby to get out. And it did not slide out despite my maneuvers. The seconds ticked by like hours without deliverance of the head. So I quickly switched places with the nurse and gave the forceful suprapubic pressure needed as she held the body and the head finally squeezed out. After vigorous stimulation, the baby let out a lusty cry, we wrapped him in the mother’s colorful African fabric and handed him back to her.

This was my first delivery since having returned to Chad. Sometimes life hands you a lemon or sometimes a bucket of lemons. I had left Chad for a short break to take a class required for missionaries by my church in Greece. While there I successfully ignored a red bump on my thumb for a day or two. I ignored it, as any good medical professional would until it got bad: red, swollen and increasingly painful. A trip to a clinic for antibiotics one night and to the ER for incision and drainage the next failed to improve the steadily growing infection.

So for the first time in my life, I was handed the lot of being hospitalized in a foreign hospital far from my loved ones and where the care is not in my language. For three nights I was inpatient for IV antibiotics until the hand surgeon there decided it was time to open and debride necrotic tissue and pus in the OR. Since my right hand was exquisitely painful and huge, the logical choice for the hand for my IVs was the left. That left me with no hand to use.

But when I had none to use, God sent another pair to my aid. Those hands are strong: strong enough to carry my broken suitcase with 50lbs of stuff up a 1 mile incline in the pouring rain after a delayed flight late at night in France, strong enough to stand for truth despite opposition from others, strong enough to leave behind all the life he has ever known to come with me to the ends of the earth in the bush of central Africa. Those hands are also gentle, gentle enough to wipe away my tears from the physical pain during my thumb infection or from my emotional pain over losing a patient senselessly now back here in Chad. These are hands that ever lift me closer to Jesus. God sent me my very own Gabriel, an angel in human form.

God saved my hand and after a month at my home in North Carolina to heal, I was back shaking hands, though with gloves, in Chad. Though some hands we can’t save, like the hand of the 3 year old I found the other day twitching with a seizure. She was sweaty and hot with fever, her eyes glazed and body limp. She had a positive malaria test and had convulsed for a least a day before she came in. All the quinine, serum glucose, blood, and antibiotics I gave her were not enough to save her. At least her parents were willing to purchase her meds and keep her here to try to keep those little hands in motion. Many parents just sneak their children home in the night to take them to the witch doctor or home to die if they are unsatisfied with their care here and feel the child is not improving enough.

The function and sensation in my thumb, praise God, is slowly improving. Improving enough to let me help ladies in just the second week back with eclampsia, uterine rupture, 2 failed VBACs, footling breech, footling breech with prolapsed cord, molar pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, severe preeclampsia, transverse presentation, and three failures to progress.

I keep my eyes always on the Lord. With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Psalm 16:8

And now I have a two more hands: hands that hold a picture roll to tell Bible stories to kids on Sabbath morning underneath the shade of trees, hands that change a flat tire at night in the mud, hands that prepare tasty Brazilian rice and beans, and hands that share the hope with Christ with the patients at our hospital.