Mary in Malawi

Today has been a really busy day. I was on a 7 to 7 shift, wich means that I work from 7 am til 7 pm. Usually we have a 3 hour lunch break between  1 pm and 4 pm.  But today, we had a very interesting class to attend to Neonatal resucutation =). Our peadiatrician Barbara held a one hour course in new born CPR. We watched a dvd about it, and then we got to practice on little baby dolly. It was fun!

Dr. Rhona and dutch med. student Floor are resucutating doll


After that, there were no time for lunch. It was a little bit of an emergency in medical ward, and Dr. Rhona needed som assistance. One patient had an interesting, but serious, condition: she had an Empyema. Shortly described, it is when you get a bad infection in one of your lungs so it gets filled with puss.  This patient was HIV positiv, so any infection she gets will be much worse than for any other patient. This lady was as good as dead when she came to the hospital two weeks earlier. You can se her x-ray from admission day here....:





As you can see, her left side is perfectly normal. Her right side, on the other hand, looks like someone messed up the picture. But it is really the way it looks. Her right lung was almost completely filled with puss. It is being treated with antibiotics iv, but she also needed a chest drainage. When it is water, you can use a normal cannula. But when it comes to puss, wich is much thicker, you need a really big thing to get it out. "The needle" used for drainage is about 1 to 1.5 cm in diameter, and it is being pushed all the way in to the lung. This was done without any problem two weeks ago. Rhona and another doctor here drained the lung for, i am not kidding, 6 litres of puss. 6 LITRES!!, Normally a lung can hold as maximum 6 litres of air. They thought that it was empty, but later on it showed that she still had a lot of puss in her lung. We tried again, Or Rhona tried while I was holding the patient. We didn't have one of the drainage needles, so we tried with normal, green and grey cannulas, thinking maybe we could get it out. But the puss was still to thick, so it didn't work. We have to make a new try tomorrow. Rhona is estimating to get out at least 2 more litres tomorrow morning. I will SO bring my camera!

Another case was quite sad.. An old lady gasping for air at the ward. She was in urgent need of oxygen, but her guardians refused. They believed that the oxygenmachine was what killed people. Didn't matter how many times we trie to explain to them, they still refused. It is a part of a traditional belief. Some patients rather believe in the witch doctors out in the villages. This lady will probobly die tonight because she cannot have oxygen. That is so frustrating to know when you go to bed..

Last week we had a very sick boy in medical ward. He was about 16 years. During night time his guardians said that they just wanted to take him to the toilet, but they never came back. Not until the next morning, when the boy was allready dead. They had decided to escape from the hospital to get to a witch doctor. The boy had been on oxygen at the hospital, and he didn't even survive the way to the witch doctor. He was dead before they got there.

Another patient came to the hospital after being treated for a minor issue like migraine or something by a witch doctor. The witch doctor had given him some really horrible potion, no one knows what was inside it. He died of liver failure caused by that potion, only hours after arriving to the hospital.

I know that it is a belief and that that is what is true to these people... but i really get angry. There are so many people who wouldn't have to die if we could do something about this horrible witch doctors. They really mess everything up.

Check out this! These floors are not very clean i tell you..... Look at my feet, after ONE DAY of walking, WITH shoes (crocs) in the hospital....