Friday, June 19, 2015

Lottery

I am not wrong very often. But I was wrong this time. My last time in PPE was not my last time in PPE. Not only did we have confirmed patients when I returned, but we had a whole mess of them. (What do you call a group of patients, anyway? Flock? Herd? ... I really wanted to say "a murder of patients", but thought the joke might be in poor taste.) My first morning back at work, we had a traditional healer die. Then the second of at least three co-wives. All before I went inside. It was like December again, with med checks taking an hour and then the actual med pass taking three.

I should have prefaced that with what happened before I even got to work that Monday (to The Mamas and the Papas - never has anyone been so right). Mornings are hard to begin with. When you actually have to speak to people before being awake for an hour, it's even crueler. When you have to call a friend and say, "Can you please help me flush something out of my eye?" before you've been awake five minutes, it's utterly ridiculous. In the room I was put in when I first got back, the air conditioner was right above the bed. And the room was tiny so I couldn't move the bed anywhere. There were birds living in the air conditioner. Or maybe they weren't living there yet, they were just building and preparing to move in. Perhaps because they're African birds, they were using a lot of cement. Tiny pieces of which were falling out onto me and my bed all night long. There must have been some in my hair, and when I woke up, it went into my eye. Naturally, we had been cheated out of generator time so the power was already out and I had no luck flushing the building material out of my eye by myself. So put that one on the "Things I've Had in my Eyes" list, right under "piece of a piano key".

Back to the point. So, here we were, having a mini outbreak in the midst of the outbreak. Our probable and confirmed wards got fuller and fuller of people with the same address. Or people who shared a bathroom with the people from the same address. The problem was that a lot of the people in these few quarantined houses were very skeptical and insisted that they would just die in their homes. Our psychosocial team plus those from other NGOs plus WHO plus UNICEF were all visiting these homes trying to educate and convince people to come in when they got sick. So eventually they did start to send some of the children to us. Not quite a week later, a set of brothers who said they would die in their house sat in our triage with flaming red eyes.

So our team worked. And we worked hard. After two days I felt like I could barely walk from standing for 12 hours in gumboots I wasn't used to anymore. Even going to the bathroom isn't a break for your feet around here when you have to squat over a hole and try not to pee on your own clown-sized pants. Every pass lasted for hours, and during the day that meant getting so sweaty that my boots started filling up. And wet socks make me crazy. But I sloshed around the wards and then dumped a few cups of my own perspiration out into the gutter after I doffed. One day I was kneeling on the concrete next to one of our kids for about 20 minutes doing her IV meds, and when I finally stood up, there was a puddle on the ground. I had sweated through my tyvek suit and rubber apron. More than the average man, I tell you.

 This little one was the sickest of our kids. Not that any of them were doing particularly well. When she was still fairly responsive, she would spit out all her oral meds at us and refuse to eat while her father yelled from over the fence in Probable for her to cooperate. One night while we were inside, she was mumbling and muttering things. I asked my nurse if she was making sense and if her responses were appropriate. She said no. Generally, once our patients get confused, they only have a few days left. But this kiddo was an ornery one, so rather than lay in bed and be confused, she wanted to get up and be confused. The end of that pass involved two caregivers chasing/holding her up, my nurse and I desperately trying to keep her close to her IV pole so she didn't rip the line out, and then my nurse yelling at me to be careful because I was kneeling in a puddle of diarrhea. Then the patient got an abscessed tooth and her face swelled up so much that her eyes swelled shut.

During all of this, we also have a trial going on. There are a few different trials going on at various treatment centers in the area. It's interesting and I'm happy to be a part of it, but it does mean some extra work for us. That coupled with our new policy/"safety feature" that mandates naked doffing if you accidentally touch your scrubs have added a bit of stress. (Well, to be fair, I think I'm the only one stressed about naked doffing.)

 The other day one of my newer coworkers was saying how this is the greatest job. And I agree. But for people who don't think like us, the million dollar question is, "Why in the world do you do this?" And there were times back in December/January when we had two separate 24-hour periods where six patients died that I wondered the same thing. But we had a discharge this morning, two of our little ones left the ETC cured. Their ornery sister was cured and discharged earlier this week. That means that 8 of the 9 positive patients we've had in the last 19 days have been or will soon be cured. So to answer the question "why in the world do we do this" is pretty simple. Because sometimes you win the lottery. 


2 comments:

  1. I love reading your posts, Sarah. You are making a difference in the world!

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  2. Thanks for posting Sarah. Thanks for all your hard work and fortitude out there.

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