McQuillen Family, Easter 2010
This is carmelius. He's the chameleon we found in a tree outside, and subsequently brought inside to play with. He's super cool, and you can see how he changes colors with his surroundings. Don't worry, after letting him scale the drapes for a little while, we turned him loose. Maybe we'll catch him again some day. The Africans are scared of the chameleons, thinking that they are poisonous (don't worry- they're not!). Just as a fun fact, there are 160 species of chameleon in the world and 135 of them are found in Africa.
This is cobra. We didn't name him because we didn't like him, which is why he is dead. One of the missionaries here blew his head nearly clean off with a shotgun. I know it doesn't look like it , but we had to be really careful with it, as they can still be dangerous if handled carelessly when dead. (disclaimer: all bravado displayed in the photo is only an act, this thing was just nasty).
And, here is Beau with not one, but two horny toads that he caught:
Ahh, reptiles.
Anyways, Happy Easter! We went to a little Easter service this morning at the chapel. It was small and brief and comprised of a larger percentage of white people than usual, owing to the fact that the majority of the people in the area are attending the "Easter Meetings." Dump trucks full of people were rolling out of here on Thursday headed for the meeting place. As the name implies, a whole bunch of people pretty much have a lock in at a school complex for four days, doing workshops, sharing food and conversation, and worshiping of course.
Here are some gratuitously cute photos of Abbi
Naturally, the Easter bunny came this morning. I'm pretty sure ours was the only house around he hit. The kids were pretty pumped this morning to see the baskets that the Easter bunny had left them, and to go hunting for the eggs that he'd hidden around the family room. We extended the fun by re-hiding the eggs after the kids found each one and excitedly plopped it into their basket! See the spiffy hiding places below!
I thought I'd put a little dittie in here about life at the hospital, so that people following the blog for professional reasons could have some tid bits to think about:
I'm still in charge of the pediatrics ward. This will be the case until early this week, when we switch roles for the last time. I'll then rotate to the female ward, which will be good for me. The pathology in the two wards is quite different, so I'm sure I'll learn a lot as I go along. I'm going to go around the peds ward mentally now, in order to highlight some of the illnesses we care for here.
I show up at 8 AM and start with prayer (except every other Wednesday, which is my "theater day"...then I just pop through and see the really sick ones). The ward is rudimentary, concrete floors, ceiling, and walls, decorated with the occasional poster. Mosquito nets tied in knots hang down above the white metal cribs that the majority of the kids lay in during the night. Those that are even moderately able tend to migrate together into the commons area outside of the hospital during the daytime. A kind nurse in a old fashioned green polyester nursing uniform meets me most days. I don't see many nurses in scrubs around here. Lets get started rounding:
On the right, just past the nurses station is a small "ICU." Maybe it should be called the "I see you" because the only advantage of these two beds is being close to the nurses station. Sometimes these kids are on oxygen concentrators, which still go down when the power goes down. The two kids in those beds this week had 1. a head injury from an ox cart accident and 2. a low blood oxygen saturation from what I presume is a congenital heart problem. We have no way to assess kid number 2, so we had to refer him to the capital city for a special ultrasound of the heart. I don't know if he'll get it or if he'll live. Sending those kids out is really, really tough to do.
After seeing those two, I'll turn to the small unit of 3 beds behind me. For the past three weeks, they have housed a motely crew of preteens with femur fractures. They all had to lay pretty still with ropes attached in various manners to their effected extremities, and weights on the other end of those ropes via a pully system, hanging precariously off the end of each bed. They were more or less well, aside from their broken legs, and so were fun to tickle, harass, and read to while they were here. They've since gone home and a new crew of 1. a four year old with a huge abdominal (Wilm's) tumor, 2. a 7 year old with both hydrocephalus AND abdominal tuberculosis, and 3. a kid that just had a hernia repair have taken the beds.
I work my way out of that little space, trying to make myself skinny enough to avoid bumping up
against the kid's traction weights, and move on to the next section of the room. Here, just past the traction area, are three beds along the wall, and four beds running perpendicular to those beds. The later four almost universally have kids with hydrocephalus in them, usually for 7 days at a time, if all goes well. Our hospital does about 75 percent off all shunt operations done on kids in Zimbabwe. It's pretty remarkable really, and I've come to feel strongly about taking care of these kids. So many of them get neglected, with disastrous consequences. The other three beds are now divided between a kid that had an undescended testicle who just had surgery, a kid that had a chronic foot wound, and the other sits empty because the 14 year old that was in it died of end stage HIV last night.
As we swing to the other side of the room now, doubling back towards the ICU, we meet with a child that has severe malnutrition. We don't know what his HIV status is yet, as he'll need to be tested at a year and a half, as is the standard, but his mom has HIV, so i'll start him on anti HIV meds before we send him home because he looks so sick. A lot of these "feed and grow" kids stay for a while in order to get their nutritional needs sorted out. As we continue on we'll find a kid with pneumonia, a newborn with sepsis, a kid that just had surgery on his genitals (hypospadius repair) and more kids with hydrocephalus that either need surgery or are undergoing treatment for the complications of hydrocephalus/surgery for hydrocephalus. Additionally, there is a little girl called "Rumbi" in one of the beds there. She is precious and has a terrible wound on her leg that we've been operating on and re-operating on for weeks. Often times, these beds will also house kids that have had surgery for clubbed feet, various hernias, fractures, and severe malaria.
As we walk past the ICU now, headed for the door, we duck into a small 8x8 room that usually holds two patients. We had a kiddo in there who was born with her intestines on the outside of her body (gastroschisis). Abbi loved that little one- "the baby with the hurt tummy," she called her. After weeks of careful feeding and nursing following a successful repair of her birth defect, she died in the night. It was very sad. I haven't adjusted to the high death rate here or to the lase-fair attitude of the locals regarding death. However, the little victories and the joy of kids getting better keep me encouraged.
Well, I hope you enjoyed rounding with me. I left out the small talk and just tried to give you a thumbnail sketch of the ward. I hope you learned something.
Happy Easter!
