Life is Not Always so Kind

Today was a sad day in peds. It just kills me. When Ansley and I got report from Caroline, we found out that one of the really critical patients had died last night.

There was another baby who was really sick too. We had been treating him for malaria and a respiratory infection. He had been getting better-- his respirations were better, his lungs were clear, and he looked like he wasn't as tired as he had been. But then he went downhill again. This morning, he started having seizures, had a fever, and his respirations were not good again. Jacques decided that we would do a lumbar puncture to check for meningitis.

We moved on with rounds, but we hadn't even finished with the next patient when we heard crying and the grandmother of the really sick baby called us over. He wasn't breathing and there was no pulse. Jacques started compressions while I opened his airway, but it was all for nothing. Once again I had to watch another mother with tears rolling down her cheeks for the loss of her baby. Once again, everything we could do was not enough. I cried as Ansley took out the IV and Jacques covered the baby with a sheet.

There was another mother who kept trying to tell Ansley and me something, but we couldn't understand her. We asked another nurse to come translate, and that's when we found out she wasn't Nangjere, she was Gumbaye. We found a different nurse to translate, and what she said was just so awful. Her baby, only several days old, was on her second dose of IV Quinine and was doing pretty well. However, the mother had just received news that her older daughter back at home had died. When she left home, her older daughter was in perfect health; we don't know what happened, just that her daughter was no longer alive. This mother didn't know what to do because her baby wasn't finished with its treatment, and she couldn't just leave her baby at the hospital to go take care of things at home. So we had to talk to Dr. Jacques who prescribed other medicine so that she could go home. It wasn't ideal treatment for her newborn baby, but what else could we do? Throughout the day as we were preparing things for her to go home, I watched as she sat on the edge of her baby's bed, head in her hands, wiping solitary tears from her eyes when she just couldn't hold it in any longer.

Life here is hard. The longer I've been here, the more I've realized just how tough Chadians are. Their strength, both physically and emotionally, amazes me. Girls here learn how to cook for a full family at the age of 10. The 8 and 9 year old girls at my house almost daily haul up gallons of water to water both of the gardens. Women give birth to between nine and twelve children, and often have to watch up to half of them die before they reach adolescence.

I don't know what to do with all that I've seen here. I'm not sure that there's much I can do about the way life is here. It doesn't seem like anything I can do would make any difference at all. And yet, I try to remind myself of all the children that do go home, happy and healthy, because of the care that we've given at the hospital. I just wish I could do more.