(Missy Nickerson) Me oh my!

So much has been going on here. We’ve seen over a hundred patients a day, averaging 140. That’s 140 patients split between two doctors…well sort of…the twins are 1 year med students but they have Caleb who’s a physician assistant who can answer any questions if they have any.

So I’m doing registration and as I like to know it Crowd Control. Which can most definitely get stressful at times but not as stressful as
HELPING DELIVER A BABY.

Haha. I helped another birth on Thursday. So the tally is 3. And by help I mean hand things to Stephanie and document the times and stuff so I can’t really claim helping deliver a baby but I kinda can = ]

The funny story of the delivery was, well, sometimes we have a hard time getting linen. People like to steal it because its nice for them to have and then sometimes people don’t want to wash them, so linen has been somewhat of a difficulty for us to find.  So Natali (the translator) and I are in the room with the mother in labor and Stephanie, the midwife.  The baby comes and we only have one towel for the baby which is just not enough for all of the fluid. So the mom doesn’t want to hold the child so the newborn is handed off to me. The baby is wrapped in this small towel and I’m holding it away from my body so as not to get blood on me.  So I call for linen and Daniel tries to find some and Natali, bless his heart is standing there, so I send him off to get linen. He comes back 3 minutes later and says no linen. So I, with a smile on my face, said Natali, I don’t want you to come back into this room unless you have linen. So he runs off.  So I’m waiting and waiting and eventually linen comes and I hold the baby closer and then I realize something, Natali isn’t back. So I say Natali? And he answers yes and sticks his head in the room.  Even though he saw linen enter the room, he still didn’t have any so he wasn’t going to come back into the room! Stephanie and I just laughed and laughed. It was classic. = ]

This Thursday was wild because I’m doing registration and then the baby comes so I help with that. After I take a quick shower to get the amniotic fluid off of me (might I say ew) and then have lunch and then back to registration, everything is going well! Everyone is being patient and registration is done at oh say 3 which is early for us. So I hop on over to my favorite place, the pharmacy, where Deng and Pretty are, and I start to help them deal out medicine when Marcos, one of the translators, comes and finds me and tells me a patient is shivering, which I knew meant convulsing because people with really bad malaria can have really bad convulsions. So I run out of the pharmacy and sure enough this young woman who had a 41.4 C fever is convulsing, so I yell for Caleb, the physians assistant, who starts an IV really quickly and gets Quinine. So as this is starting buckets of water starts pouring from the sky. So everything gets chaotic. We situate the young woman in one of the consultation rooms to get her out of the rain and then I hear commotion from the “waiting area” and I run out and everyone is pointing to a young child who is seriously convulsing. I rush him in to the first consultation room and the same thing, I.V. and quinine. Then I have to manage to get people out of the rain and its so loud because our roofs are metal and hectic. And as we like to say, welcome to Sudan

They both ended up being fine, just bad bouts of malaria but you can imagine it was a odd day of seeing such life and such hurt. Praying through it all.

A piece of Sudan life = ]