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Trauma Drama

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Today Linguisa (aka Little Link as the name means Portuguese small sausage) died. He was the baby in our house (aka kitty kingdom). Gabriel found him about two months ago dirty and flea-covered wandering around the compound. So he took him, cleaned him, fed him, and then Linguisa followed us like a shadow incessantly. He was never content unless he was by our sides and even just last night spent quality time with Papa Gabriel in front of the charcoal fire watching the beans cook and the bread rise. But then we think he took a fall of death. You see, we don’t have normal tranquil kitties. We have gangsta kitties who are not content to just hang out on our spacious back porch. No, several of them busted a hole in our screen and escaped. We patched it with more screen and then cardboard but still those gangsta kitties would bust through. But Linguisa wouldn’t escape for the outside, no, he would scale the screen to the top of the metal roof and then climb into the 10 inch space

C’est la vie (au Chad)

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They pulled her out of a rusty old pickup truck. She was clearly of the more well to do class given she didn’t come in on an ox cart or motorcycle like the majority of our patients unable to walk. The family carried her out of the vehicle using a blanket as a stretcher and deposited her on the gurney. Since she looked only half cognizant, we brought her straight to the OR. I started barraging the sister with questions and leafing through the carnet as the nurses started IV lines. She was supposedly 8 months pregnant and was transferred from a hospital at least 4 hours away. The reason for referral was, according to the sister, that they did not have a cesarean kit available for the patient. As I looked through the carnet I saw she was admitted 17 days previous with a blood pressure of 210/120. And there she stayed for 17 days being treated with oral antihypertensives, some of which are known to be contraindicated in pregnancy. Then two days prior to her transfer, she was give

Comeback

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Comeback I found her thrashing on the examination table in the labor room. The time was around 1am, and I had been called to see her by the maternity nurse who said a woman was convulsing. She had had no prenatal care and her family knew nothing about the statuts of her pregnancy other than that they thought she was around 8 months pregnant. Her chest heaved with each breath and I could hear the crackles in her lungs without stethoscope. She would not respond to questioning and was barely conscient. Her blood pressure was 140/90. Eclampsia with pulmonary edema and impending respiratory failure. This lady was going to die. I grabbed the fetal doppler and found a normal fetal heart rate. At least if I couldn’t save her, I might be able to save her baby. I heard a fetal heart beat in the normal range. So we kicked into high gear. We ran her gurney as fast as we could to the OR. Her respirations were becoming more and more labored. Time was slipping through our fingers and she