Birthdays

Last week I had my birthday, and I thought I would write a little bit about what we did on my birthday, and I also thought it would be a good opportunity to write a funny story about someone else's birthday.

For my birthday, I was really excited because I didn't have to work until 9 pm, so I had the whole day free to do whatever I wanted. We decided that we would do a big meal all together to celebrate my birthday and Maria's birthday, which was the day before. So Ansley, Emily, Maria, and I all prepared the food. We had cucumbers with salad dressing, and big franks! Both my parents and Jacob's parents had sent us canned veggie meat, so we were able to have hot dogs with onion, mayonnaise, and ketchup that we had found in Lai on our bike trip. The meal was wonderful! And then, Ansley, Maria, and I made cookies. Sarah and James let us use their oven, and so we made some interesting cookies... We didn't have butter, so we used peanut oil, and we only had a few small eggs, so the cookies ended up tasting like slightly crumbly peanut butter cookies. They also had craisins and pecans in them! They were really good.

So that was pretty much what we did for my birthday. Then, that night I had to work the night shift, and boy was that a memorable night. Ansley and Augustin 1 (there are 2 Augustin's here) had been working and were supposed to pass the patients off to me and Gilbert. Unfortunately, Gilbert was really late, and we weren't really sure if he was going to come. He did come eventually; he had just overslept.

During change of shift we had something happen with one of our pediatric patients that affected me a lot. I can't explain why it affected me so much, and it doesn't make much sense, but here's the story.

We had one 3 year old boy in the urgencie room with tetanus and some other problems (probably malaria). Tetanus causes your body to have muscle spasms, and it's very difficult for your muscles to relax. Not many of our patients with tetanus survive because there's not a whole lot that we can do for them. We give them some medicine called Diazepam to try to relax their muscles, and there's an anti-tetanus medicine but we don't have it here at our hospital. The muscle spasms make it very difficult to breathe since your breathing is controlled by the diaphragm, which is a muscle.

So this boy had really ragged breaths, and he was having almost constant muscle spasms, they just wouldn't let up. And while Ansley, Augustin 1 (one of the local nurses), and I were standing there, he stopped breathing. So Augustin started doing chest compressions. I had never seen this boy before, that night was the first time I had seen him. I don't know what it was, but I just felt overwhelmed. I started crying silently and praying. It didn't make any sense, but I just started praying hard, "God, not him. Don't let this baby die." I even asked God to let him live, as a birthday present for me, which in retrospect seems kind of a silly thing to ask God.

Finally, he started breathing again. And the muscle spasms returned. And as we left his bedside, I thanked God, but I began to think about that baby and how tired his little body was from fighting. I prayed again that God would let him live, but then I prayed that if that wasn't best, that God would do what He knew was best.

About 20 minutes later, Gilbert came to find me and told me that he had died. I was really upset, but in some ways, I was glad for him to have rest. But it still doesn't make any sense to me why I was affected so deeply by this boy that I had never laid eyes on before, and why I had this overwhelming sense of not wanting God to let him die. That was the beginning of a long, long night shift. Generally on the night shift, we are able to sleep in between doing our work. We make sure all the 9 pm meds are done, and then we can sleep until midnight, do the midnight meds and vital signs, and then sleep until 5 am meds and vital signs. This is if all goes well and there are no emergencies.

By the time we were finished with the boy with tetanus, it was already 11 pm, so there wasn't much time before midnight meds. I decided that I would organize the registers where we keep record of what patients we have, and then I started the midnight meds and vitals. As I was finishing with the last patient, a man came up to me and said, "My sister, there is a delivery" (he said it in French of course...). So I told him to wait a minute and I would be right there. But I remember thinking, I can't do anything about it anyway-- Hortence, the mid-wife, is the only one with a key to the delivery room.

As I came to the end of the hallway and was almost outside, I heard the very familiar sound of a woman in labor. Very shortly after that, I heard the sound of a baby crying, loud. I turned the corner outside on the sidewalk, and was slightly shocked by what I saw. There was a woman squatting on the ground next to the sidewalk, and her husband was crouched down next to her holding a very agitated newborn baby.

I ran fast to get Gilbert over in pediatrics, and when I told him what happened he started running back toward the woman and her family. I wondered what on earth we were going to do because all the clamps, scissors, and bulb suctions were locked in the maternity room. Luckily, Gilbert had gone over to Hortence's house when the man and his wife first came in, so he had just come back with the key.

I sat down on the sidewalk next to the man and his wife and tried frantically to get the man to let me cover the baby with something, but he was rattling off some agitated French that I couldn't understand. I kept trying to cover the baby because it was cold outside and newborns can't regulate their own temperature anyway. Finally, Gilbert found a clamp, clamped the cord, and then cut it, so I took the baby away from the father and started covering it up. We moved the woman and her baby into the delivery room, and I began to work on taking the baby's vital signs and measurements. At one point, I remember turning around to see how Gilbert was doing with the mother, and I was met by a shocking sight. There was Gilbert with half of his hand inside the woman, doing his own little curetage sans anesthesia and sans sterile technique. I asked him if the placenta was complete, and he showed me that it was, so I'm not 100% sure what he was trying to do.

Just as we finished up all the care for the newborn and the mother, Hortence walked in looking like she had just rolled out of bed. She was about to ask how dilated the mother was when she noticed the newborn baby all wrapped up on the bed. Here's the exchange that happened between us:

Hortence: She already delivered?
Kristin: Yep.
H: Who delivered the baby, you?
K: Nope.
H: Gilbert?
K: Nope. (I smiled)
H: Well then who?
K: The father.

At this point, Hortence gave me the most shocked expression I've seen on a Chadian's face yet. It was pretty funny. So I explained to her what had happened. We moved the mother out into the maternity beds, and then Hortence insisted that we clean the delivery room right then, just in case someone else came in that night. Chadians do not know how to clean very well. Their idea of cleaning is pouring bleach water on everything. So Hortence began flooding the room with buckets of water and handed me the little thing they use to scrape the water outside. This was counterproductive; as I was sort of sweeping the water out, she was pouring more water onto the maternity bed, which then flooded the floor that I had just cleared.

Being very tired, and not wishing to continue with the counter-productivity, I just stood there until she finished. At that point, she grabbed the scraper thing and started sweeping the water out herself, which was fine with me because at that point it was almost 2 am, and I was tired and my throat was getting more and more sore.

Luckily, there were no more emergencies and I was able to get about 3 hours of sleep that night. What a night, and what a birthday.

Sick...

So, I thought that you deserved some news that was not horribly outdated. Here's the first of a few.

So apparently Africa and I haven't hit it off so well. I am, yet again, sick.

Last week on Wednesday or Thursday (12th or 13th of November), I started having a sore throat and thought that another cold was coming on. I lost my voice (still don't have a voice...), and had all the normal cold symptoms- runny nose, sore throat, etc. But it just wasn't going away, and I started feeling wheezes in my lungs.

I talked to James on Tuesday... Bronchitis it is! Or at least that's what James is treating it as. So, I'm taking medicine, and to fix the wheezes in my lungs, he prescribed me some salbutamol breathing treatments. It has definitely been an interesting experience to use the nebulizer here. I've never had to do anything like that before, and I don't like it. When I finish with the medicine, I feel like I've just downed a shot of straight caffeine because it makes my heart race and I get all jittery. No good.

That night I started to get a fever, and I thought, "This can't be good..." All day Wednesday, I felt absolutely miserable. I had a fever all day long, severe nausea, headache, achy muscles, and just in general felt drained. I took a malaria test, but it came back negative. Sometimes we get false negatives, but I decided not to take the medicine just yet. I think I'm going to get re-tested on Friday if it persists. I may just start taking the malaria treatment anyway even if it's negative again. We'll see.

Lest you think that this is a completely negative blog, I will add here a blessing. We had been planning a big bike trip for a few weeks now, and it was supposed to happen this past Sunday. I went to bed on Saturday night not feeling any better- still had a very sore throat, coughing, runny nose, etc. But on Sunday morning, I woke up feeling so much better! I still didn't have a voice, and I was coughing a little bit, but I decided that I would go anyway.

We had an absolutely amazing time! It was one of the best times I've had yet in Chad. I'll have to write about it in a separate blog, but it was super fun. And I was so blessed because I was able to go, and I actually didn't feel bad all day long. We biked for probably a total of 40 km that day and went swimming. I know God must have been with me, helping me to have the energy and the health to go, and I am so very thankful.

*Post note: It's now Friday. I got re-tested for malaria, and while I was at it, I did some other tests too. The last three days I've been really fatigued. I haven't really had energy to move around much, and I was trying to figure out why, because usually I don't get that way with fevers and such, at least not that bad. I began to wonder what my hemoglobin was because I had recently given blood and stuff, so I had that checked too. The results? Malaria it is. And my hemoglobin was 10.3 g/dl (normal is somewhere above 12), so that explains the fatigue. So I got some malaria medicine and some iron pills. That ought to fix me up real fast :D I'm actually trying a different medication than Quinine this time... I have to take four pills twice a day, and it's only for three days. But I still have to take Doxy for a week. And while the new medicine lacks many of the side effects that Quinine brings, it most definitely makes me very nauseated and is probably the most disgusting thing that I've put in my mouth since entering Chad. No joke. But life is good.

Bike Trip!

More current news! Are you in shock?

November 16, 2008

As I mentioned before, we had been planning a bike trip for a while. Originally it was going to be a three-day camping trip, and Nathaniel wanted to be able to meet families around the area. We had to make some changes, and we ended up deciding that we were going to bike to Lai, a slightly larger village that's 18 km away.

Sunday morning, we all met over at the middle house with bikes, backpacks, and lots of excitement. Each of us had borrowed bikes from random different people, and I had arranged to come to work late that evening because we wouldn't be back until late evening, and I was supposed to work at 3pm.

We finally got everything ready to go a little bit before 9am, and took off. It was a beautiful day-- sunshine, clear skies, and a nice, constant breeze. We couldn't have asked God for a better day to go.

I guess I should explain who exactly "we" included. There were six of us total: Nathaniel, Emily, Jacob, Ansley, me, and Daniel (the father of the house that Nathaniel stays at). Daniel was nice enough to endure the teasing from other Africans that he was hanging out with all the "Nassara" (white people). It was really fun to have him along, and it came in handy several times to have a local with us.

The trip there was not particularly eventful, but it was so much fun. We had some good times joking around with each other, taking pictures and videos, and other things. Emily had brought a harmonica, so we had fun with that. One person would play for a little bit, and then do a hand-off to another person while we were biking.

Once we got to the river, we had to be ferried across to get to town. This was definitely the most sketchy "ferry" system I've ever seen in my life. We paid 300 francs a piece to have ourselves and our bikes taken across in a long canoe-resembling tree trunk. Funny thing was that it was sewn together in places with really thick string (or very thin rope), and there was actually one man whose job was to bail out the water as we made our way across the river. There were also two people "rowing" with large bamboo type sticks that they used to push against the bottom of the river (so it really wasn't terribly deep). We were all very thankful to make it across with no problems and some good laughs.

Oh, and while we were getting in, another man came up to ride along with us, and we recognized him! His name was Paul, and he had been a patient at the hospital here for a long time. I had gotten to know him pretty well while he stayed at the hospital, and so had Jacob, so it was really cool for us to see him there and get to talk to him again.

After we got across, we biked into town, and decided to find a place to eat (it was about 11:15 when we got to town). Daniel helped us find a restaurant that would serve vegetarian food, and we all sat down for a nice meal. Restaurants here in Chad are very interesting. The one that we ate in was essentially a little closed in hangar, complete with thatched roof, and a large grass mat on the ground for you to sit on. They bring your food out on large, round platters with plates. We all had bread and a dipping sauce. The meat-eaters had a goat sauce, and the vegetarians had an interesting sauce composed of oil, mayonnaise, tomatoes, and onions (which was surprisingly very good). We also splurged and had cold drinks. Although, my drink turned out to be
disappointing; it looked like a strawberry soda, but it tasted an awful lot like bubble gum, which I don't like. But it was nice to have a cold drink.

After lunch, we decided to bike around town for fun. So we biked around for a while, just taking random turns whenever we felt like it. One funny incident from our exploration... Here in Chad, it is not uncommon to see two guys walking hand in hand, which has taken some getting used to. So as we're biking down one street, Nathaniel and Jacob start talking about this, and they started holding hands while biking down the street (they're true Chadians now... I'll have to write a blog about qualifications for being a true Chadian later). Ansley was in front of them and decided that she wanted to get a video because it was so funny, but when she went to do so, she ended up crashing and they nearly ran into her! In her defense, it really was the most graceful fall I've seen yet- she managed to walk/run out of it, but then collapsed on the ground in laughter.

There wasn't much interesting there, but it was fun to explore. There's this one bus stop (we think that's what it is) where there's a large cement thing that has paintings on it and distances from Lai to other villages. I think it's the closest thing resembling Chadian public sculpture that I've seen yet. I wish that we had gotten a picture of it, but maybe some other time. We also saw the hospital there (which looks very big and official next to ours), and we saw a funeral procession while biking through town.

After we finished riding around, we ended up at the river (a ways away from the ferry route) where it was less crowded, and we decided to go swimming. It was at this point that we realized how very sunburnt we all were. Nathaniel, Emily, and Jacob ended up swimming all the way across the river (maybe 1/4 of a mile?) and they had fun jumping off little cliffs into the water. I got tired after swimming halfway out to the sandbar, and Ansley decided to stay closer to the shore. So, I sat down on the sandbar and soaked up some more sun and cool water.

Then three random guys swam up to me, sat down in the sand across from me, and started talking to me. I was kind of irritated at first and kind of hoped that they would go away if I didn't start conversation. But alas, they were disposed to talk, and they initiated conversation. But it actually turned out being a nice conversation. They knew some people from the hospital, and we talked a little bit about religion (one was Catholic, one was Muslim, and one was an Evangelical Christian of some sort).

When we finished swimming, we went to the market where we shopped around for different things. And then we headed back. At this point, I was pretty tired. We had some issues with the ferry on the way back. Luckily, this time the boat was not sewn together, and there was no need for a bailer. However, they tried to charge us
500 francs a piece instead of 300 (people here try to rip off white people all the time and give us higher prices because they think that we're rich). So Daniel had a nice heated argument with one of the boat steerers. But it all worked out in the end.

On the way home, things were going great until we got about 6 km away from Bere, and my bike chain fell off. It fell off three times in a row before Nathaniel decided that some extra repairs were needed. He gave me his bike (which was too tall for me to ride, so I walked it) and told me to go ahead while him and Jacob fixed mine. The chain actually ended up breaking and they had to fix it. While I was walking Nathaniel's bike, several people asked me if I was ok, and a few stopped to help me, which is funny because I didn't look like I was in distress, I was just walking the bike, but no one offered to stop and help Nathaniel and Jacob who were slaving over a
broken bike chain in the sand. What can I say? I guess I just exude the air of "damsel in distress."

So we made it back without any major problems, and I was only a little bit late for the 6pm medications, which turned out to be alright because there were very few patients and I got them all done quickly. But I was most definitely exhausted by the end of the trip. Oh, one other funny thing (Christy, Emily, and Andrew will find this particularly amusing). Ansley decided that all of us deserved special awards for the trip.

Emily won the mountain-biker award because she just looked the part, and her bike looked more like a mountain bike. Nathaniel won the safari-man award because of his funny touristy, safari hat. Jacob and Ansley both got the stuntman award (Ansley for her several graceful falls, and Jacob because he'd randomly go no hands and very nearly wipe out). And I got the ghetto bike award because my bike was really ridiculous with only one pedal, a really messed up seat, broken brake handlebars (no Chadian bike has brakes by the way), and a loose chain. Oh, and Daniel got the intense Chadian award because he's pretty much one of the only Chadians we've seen who would go on an 18 km bike trip with 5 crazy white people.

After our trip we were all quite sore; we couldn't sit down comfortably for a few days (Ansley, Jacob, and I all got bruises from our bike seats). But I think we all came away with a deep sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. It was an awesome trip.

Theory of Fearlessness

This is just a small excerpt (with some slight changes) from an email I wrote, but I thought I would post it here. This is my theory of fearlessness.


It's funny; I think I've always been really fearful of lots of things. When I was little and dad and mom would leave at night even if it were just to go to the grocery store, I couldn't sleep until I heard the door open and them come in because I was afraid that something would happen to them. And even in college, there were lots of times when I was afraid of different things.

But I think that just before coming to Africa, like at the end of last semester in school, I began to realize that God had plans for me, and that he would keep me safe. I came up with a theory that has helped me not to be afraid while I'm here. It goes something like this: I don't think that God brought me to the middle of Africa just to die; I believe that He brought me here to do His work and to spread His love. And, even if God did bring me here to die, my life is in His hands, and there's no better place to be.

God has a plan for me, and I have no need to be afraid of anything that comes my way or that might come my way because fear is wasted energy when the God of the universe holds you in His hands. It's helped me to remember this a lot of times. There have been so many opportunities for fear since I've been here-- there are pit vipers here, I walk home every night by myself in the dark, the small war, and lots of others-- but I don't think I can really remember being scared except for when I was riding the horse and fell off. Even then, I think I knew that I would be ok.

I'm not saying that nothing bad will happen to me, because bad things do happen even to those who love God. But, I have no need to fear what will happen to me because ultimately, my life is in God's hands.

Dangerous Prayers

Again, outdated, but it's news...

October 20, 2008

Today I didn't work at all because I have been switched to the night/evening shift until the end of October. So the way that it works is like this: One day completely off, the next day from 3pm - 9pm, then the next day 9pm - 8am. And you just cycle through that schedule. The nice thing is that i get about 2 days off each week, and there are two other nurses working with me.

So, today I was off. This afternoon Stefan decided to go riding, and I thought I would go for a ride on the other horse on my own. Ansley helped me catch Pepper, but he was being really stubborn and kind of feisty. His attitude made both of us a little nervous, so I decided not to ride. Besides, I kind of had a bad feeling about going, but I couldn't explain why. A little later, Sarah came and asked me if I wanted her to help me catch and saddle Pepper so that I could ride. So I changed my mind and decided to go.

Just as we were saddling him, Stefan came back on Bob. Unfortunately, Bob had little motivation to go fast, and Stefan didn't get much of a ride. So Stefan decided to go out riding with me. We started off at a nice slow walk. Then we got the horses to go a little faster. Sadly, when we got to one stretch of road there were a lot of kids, and Pepper gets very skittish around kids. I guess the kids here think that it's fun to scare the horses, so Pepper does not like children. Oh, I forgot one thing. Just before we had gotten to the kids, Pepper was running to catch up to Bob, and a tree branch (the end of a tree branch) rammed straight into my eye because I didn't have time to duck. At that point, I called up to Stefan and said, "I think we're going to have to go back now." I told him what happened and that I was seeing spots in my left eye. But then it started getting better, and I could see alright despite my eye hurting a lot.

So I said that we could keep going. As we got to where the kids were, Pepper started getting nervous. Stefan told me to go ahead a little way to the crossroad and wait for him there while he tried to chase the kids away. When I got to the crossroad, Pepper decided that he didn't want to wait, and he bolted. I tried to get him to stop or slow down, but he was flying. I've never in my life gone that fast on any horse. I started to get really scared when I realized that he wasn't going to slow down. Also, this was my first time riding with an English saddle, so my balance wasn't very good.

I began to pray because I just knew that I was going to fall off. Sure enough, I flew off the left side, landed on my lower back, and rolled. Sometime when I fell, I also managed to hit my head and left arm/shoulder. As I laid there, I wondered if I should try to get up or not, but thought to myself, "No, Stefan will come soon, and he'll know what to do," which was kind of a silly though because Stefan is not really medically minded, and I'm the nurse. Then I realized that I wasn't sure if I could move my left leg even if I wanted to. This brought a new fear that it might be paralyzed, which was actually kind of silly to think because I could still feel it.

Finally, I saw Stefan coming on Bob, and when he got to me, he asked if I was alright. I told him I wasn't sure if I could move, but I would try. So he gave me a hand up, and I discovered my ability to move, which was exciting, yet painful. We walked ever so slowly back to the hospital, which was luckily not far away, though I don't remember much of the walk except for a lot of pain. Once at the hospital, I explained a little of what happened to Ansley and some others. Then I went to take a shower and see what injuries I had. Thankfully, it could have been much worse. I took inventory and found that I had a scrape above my left eye, a swollen and bruised left eye, scrape on my lower back, very swollen lower back, and sore legs. All very minor, non-threatening injuries, praise God.

I walked slowly home for dinner after my shower. While I was walking home, I started to get really nauseated and felt like I might pass out. I told Berthe and the girls what happened. Then I laid down on my bed to wait for food. It was at this point that I began to cry, and I told God that I didn't want to be here. As I laid in bed, I began to try to go through what had happened, but some parts were fuzzy, and I couldn't remember. So then I began to worry that I might have a concussion, but I didn't think I had hit my head that hard, and I didn't think that I had lost consciousness. And, another odd thing, from the time I fell to the time I got home, it all felt like deja vu. I felt like I had dreamed all that happened before, every detail.

Anyway, here comes the cool part of the story. As I laid in bed crying and thinking I didn't want to be here, I thought, "No. Wait. This is just another of Satan's schemes to discourage me." And then I remembered my worship and my prayer from this morning. This morning I had been thinking about the fact that I don't praise God enough, and especially when situations are bad. I felt like I had been complaining a lot and I don't always have the most positive attitude. So this morning, I sang some praise hymns, read some Psalms of praise, and prayed that God would teach me to be like Paul- praising God in every situation.

Once I remembered my worship, I began to sing the Doxology hymn and prayed. I decided that I would have a good attitude and not complain. And once I started singing and praying, I actually began to feel joyful and at peace; it was really amazing to feel God working so clearly. Beyond that, I realized another blessing in all of this. When I was eating my dinner a little later, I noticed that my back hurt a lot less if I was sitting up straight. Since the beginning of this past summer, I've been trying to work on having better posture. So as I sat up very straight and ate my dinner, I thought, "wow, now that it hurts to slouch, maybe I'll make even more progress with my posture." As soon as I thought this, I laughed and thanked God.

Looking back, I've thought of some other blessings and things to be thankful for. First of all, I didn't break any bones, and I wasn't paralyzed- both huge blessings. Second, I feel reassured in my theory that God didn't bring me to the middle of Africa to die (I'll have to write later about my theory of fearlessness). It was also a blessing that this happened on my day off, and I don't have to work until tomorrow afternoon. Finally, I realized that it was really good that I didn't go out riding by myself the first time because had I gone alone, things could have been much worse. So, be careful what you pray for; prayers can be a dangerous thing ;)

Praise God from whom all blessings flow; Praise Him all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.