After my first 45 minutes in the hospital I was considering getting on a plane and heading back home. It was a combination of witnessing some of the worst-off people I have ever seen (most of them don’t seek medical care until they are REALLY sick), being told by the doctor that the first kid I saw is a ‘lost cause’ and would be sent home to die, overwhelmed by the old/ lack of medical equipment and the huge limit in the care and procedures that could be provided, a lady delivering a stillborn 24 weeker on the floor right in the middle of everyone at the nurses’ station in the hall… put that with the fact that it is extremely crowded, hot, and smelly I am pretty surprised I didn’t pass out before I made it outside to a bench and sat down (haha for those of you that don’t know I have a tendency to become light-headed pretty quickly- my sister Amanda has the same problem, I’ll blame my parents J). I emailed my family and told them for the first time in my life I asked God for something that I wanted him to deliver to me right at that moment: strength. And Phillipians 4:13 (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”) came to me. I guess all those memory verses in AWANA paid off. When I went back in things were a million times better. It’s not usually like that- just my luck to have all that happen to me my first little bit in the hospital. And everything has been great since then.
I will be spending most of my time in the OR and clinic. They have a pretty good set of staff nurses (ABWE has a nursing school here in the compound, they have graduated two classes so far) and there really isn’t a whole lot of nursing care that can be given. It’s pretty much routine: start an IV, treat malaria and anemia, and the occasional NG tube. So my hands are more useful in the operating room.
It’s hard to find time to get on here and write- I stay very busy during the day and am pretty tired at night. There is one computer that about 20 people share for email. But I’ll try!
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