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Showing posts from 2020

Before their eyes

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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 My old scratched and outdated ones just weren’t doing the job for these extremely myopic eyes.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

Contrast

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  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

Under the Mosquito Net

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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.

Charge over you

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We called her over a month before our already-booked flight to confirm she would be present in clinic. The OB/GYN for our airline out of Africa verbalized that the 36 week gestation limit for travel was correct and that we could have a consultation in her office the day before flying home to the US to obtain a letter of permission.  The reason for the inquiry was that our colleague missionary with much personal pregnancy experience had been illegally detained at the airport in N’Djamena some years ago. She was prevented from flying because she appeared greater than 27 weeks gestation and the airport refuses to let women fly after that time. So I breathed a huge sigh of relief after the phone call with the doctor and continued to work here in Béré during the summer.  My pregnancy passed uneventfully in Béré, except for a bout of malaria at 28 weeks. I feared for the baby when my fever reached 103.6 but mercifully I defervesed quickly. We were immensely thankful it was the fi