This is not a horror movie, it's real life

Wednesday April 7, 2010

This week, I'm trying to grasp what's been going on. It feels a little dark and I'm not sure why. Monday night I had the most haunting experience I've ever had here. It was 11pm and I went to the hospital to give our dehydrated baby with diarrhea/vomiting fluids via the NG we had placed the Friday before. He was still not taking fluids orally. I get there and see the baby is laying on his side with a spot of red blood he had just vomited. He was still gagging some, his mouth and nostrils still coated with blood. I start to escalate inside and run to the other room to get some gloves. He hadn't been vomiting blood before. I get back to the room and then I spot some stuff in his mouth. I ask the mom, what did you give him?!! I try to scoop whatever it is in his mouth out with my fingers - he's still obviously in distress. Then I see it... in the back pockets of his mouth sit a pile of an uncountable amount of white small worms wiggling their little bodies away - coated in the blood that was still in his mouth.

I didn't know what to do. I was at a loss. I tried to scoop them out but they were wedged and too far back. I tried for a while until I realized I needed help and some bravery from someone else considering it was almost midnight and my headlight was almost dead and I was in a dark room with a five month old baby who has worms coming out his mouth.

I sprinted back to the house and got Sara. We did what we could for another hour or so with a bulb syringe, tweezers, and every worm medicine we could think of, but could only do so much. It's awful, a nightmare of the worst kind, except that it was real life. I don't understand this and I am having trouble shaking this one. I almost vomited on our way back home and was oscillating between laughing with hysteria, shock, and crying some. I had to shower again to calm my mind that I hadn't taken any worms home with me. Yes. a nightmare. Worms are something that eat the dead, not a five month old baby. I can't help but think that physically, we are fighting against a game that is already lost. Yes, my pessimism is coming through tonight. I don't know what kind of game is going on here.

Just these past two days it's been worms and wounds galore. Dr. Michael is becoming the king of stitching machete wounds; maybe four or five in the past week we've had. And the one yesterday was a 16 year old boy who chopped through his entire bone while "weeding" his garden. And we got a lady in the hospital with a massive deep wound covering her whole upper thigh, which we had to debreed. She had been here a few weeks ago and the wound was not so bad. It's mind boggling how a wound could get so bad in such a short time until we decided to do an HIV test...positive. We are fighting a bigger battle here...HIV, TB, abscesses, burns, machete wounds, worms....the fight against physical illness and degredation is overwelming this week.