For the month of May, I am rounding on the pediatric ward. It can be very difficult to see so many sick kids. The first day I rounded in peds, the ward was full and overflowing. Thankfully things have calmed down and now the ward is only half full. Some of the kids I really feel bad for are kids with femur fractures. They have to lay in bed in the hospital for weeks with traction on their broken leg. And unlike hospitals at home, there are no toys and no "child life specialists" to distract them. Currently I have 2 children in traction and when the second one arrived, I hatched a plot. They were in different areas of the ward, but I convinced the nurses to put their beds next to each other. So the 9 and 10 year old boys at least have each other to talk to and commiserate with.
The weather here is beginning to get cold, especially at night. Several weeks ago, I admitted a 3 year old girl with about 25-30% of her body burned. Kids with burns are so hard to keep warm but it is very important for them. I was able to get one of the American nurses here to let me use her space heater to warm the small isolation room at the from of the ward. The little girl with the burns did miraculously well and was able to go home after a couple weeks. Currently we have several babies with malnutrition and a couple of them are only weeks old, so I've tucked the littlest ones into the warm room, in hopes they will do better there.
On Wednesday night, Alice got called down to the hospital for a child who came in with fever and trouble breathing. The poor 15-month old looked terribly ill. His lungs sounded full of junk and he was working exceptionally hard to breathe. The mother told us this all began at 1 o'clock that afternoon, but clearly the kid was too sick for that to have been the beginning. We started him on antibiotics and oxygen and breathing treatments, and counselled mom that he was very sick and might not survive. At that news, she began cutting off the strings tied around baby's neck and wrists and ankles. The strings are blessed by "prophets" and are purported to prevent evil from entering the body. The "prophets" often tell people not to go to the hospital. (we recently lost a breech baby of a first time mom during delivery because the prophet told her she would deliver fine without a c-section, so she didn't come for her surgery). As we got more of the story, it became apparent that mom was quite definite about this all starting at 1 o'clock while the baby had been playing outside. We now realized that it was very likely the child had put something in his mouth and then gotten it stuck in the airway. Unfortunately our scope for looking down into the lungs and fetching small objects out of them, was too large for this child. We began considering other options and were able to contact an ENT who works near a government hospital. He spoke with the doctor at the hospital who could do the procedure. (understand this is a huge miracle. Hospitals in Zimbabwe often don't have phone numbers, doctors are frequently unreachable, and coordination of care is mostly impossible) Our hospital driver was gone, so one of the missionaries volunteered to drive the child 3 hours to the other hospital, We loaded a huge oxygen tank into the truck bed and ran the tubing through a window. The child arrived after hours and a doctor actually came in and did the procedure that night (also never happens here). They found a small seed stuck in the airway and removed it and the child is recovering very well. The long term missionaries say that they have never seen something like this happen so smoothly. So we are thanking God for enabling us to save this little one's life.
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