Floating
This week at the hospital I worked M-F, 630-4ish each day. There were several volunteers in Peds this week, so I was not given a full patient load so that I could be available to float and help out with the kids having surgery. There was a visiting pediatric surgeon here who did 2-3 procedures each day. So this week I did a lot of monitoring kiddos coming out of anesthesia. That looks something like this:
-Strap a bunch of monitors on the little body to make sure they are in fact bringing you a sedated child and not a dead one. Take vital signs. Record vital signs. The OR is a meat locker, so start defrosting the child.
-If necessary, apply an oxygen delivery device to the child’s face in some manner. Note: if the anesthesiologist tells you to put some O2 on the kid and it takes four people to hold the crazed munchkin down so you can even get the nasal cannula within 5 feet of their face- kid don’t need oxygen. They breathin just fine.
-Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs. Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs. Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs. Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs.
-In the meantime, make sure said crazed munchkin is closely supervised during the waking up period. The loopy little characters are prone to thrashing, which can easily lead to carefully placed tubes in their bodies getting ripped out. We put lots of tubes in children when they have procedures, down their nose, out their chest, in their vein, out their wound, out their, well, other stuff. Having any of the aforementioned tubes prematurely evicted by the little drunken looney toon leads to much gnashing of teeth and other unpleasantries on my part.
-Make sure nothing is leaking out of the child that should be staying in. Make sure things start coming out that are supposed to come out.
That is essentially the quick and dirty post-anesthesia care that I learned this week. The Lord took care of me and my kids. No one had any bad reactions or complications from their surgeries.
Dust
I saw my first dead body this week. And then another one a few days later. They were both small, newborn babies and I didn’t see or care for either of them while they were alive, so it was very unemotional. It was so strange to see their bodies laying there on the bed, waiting to be taken away to who knows where. They were so grey and dusky. You don’t really realize how much color our blood gives us until you see a body without it flowing through. Seeing a lifeless body makes me even more unable to understand how anyone can think this life is all there is. A body is such a vacant thing without its soul. From dust we came and that is really all that is left behind, dust.
We also had a baby born at the hospital this week. Which was actually a real surprise, since we don’t do labor and delivery there. I do love the birthday parties. It was good to see the beautiful, healthy baby girl, since we only get the really sick ones usually. It makes me realize even more how alive we are. The light behind our eyes. The warmth in our bodies. The breath in the lungs and the beating hearts. Life is beautiful. But there is SO MUCH MORE than this. Because whether you are hours or decades or a century on earth, still all that is left behind is dust.
Sometimes I long to know what heaven will be like. When we don’t need these fragile, weak, broken dust-bodies. When we are made new by the God who is making all things new. I’m a dancer, and when you’re a dancer everything in life really becomes a dance of sorts. And to me, heaven is dancing. Oh, how we’ll dance and dance. When I dance, here and now, in this fragile dust-body, I dream of heaven. And I almost touch it sometimes. Because one day, this body will just be a grey shell of dust too. And that is when I’ll be truly alive.
Making room
On Friday we had two emergencies come in. One was a premature baby brought from another hospital. As I mentioned earlier, our hospital doesn’t do labor and delivery. However, we have a pediatric unit and one of the only NICUs in the country. Most hospitals that deliver babies don’t have the ability to care for the babies. Welcome to Haiti. So what happens if someone has a baby at another hospital and it is premature or not thriving and needs further care, is the dad or aunt or someone takes the baby, wraps it up, and gets in the car, or tap-tap, or motorcycle and goes from hospital to hospital trying to find someone who will take the baby and care for it. If the hospital is full they will get turned away. As you can probably imagine, these babies don’t have great chances. But if they make it to us and we have a place to keep them, we will do all we can for them. We admitted the baby into our only open bed.
About an hour later someone steps into the unit and hands the doctor a newborn with a cleft palate that was brought in to see the doctor in the day clinic. “Something’s wrong,” they say. In this particular case, “something’s wrong” meant “not breathing.” Commence flurry of activity. Five nurses and a pediatrician can in fact somehow all fit around one tiny little body. Somebody doing chest compressions, somebody giving breaths with the ambu bag, somebody starting an IV, somebody giving epinephrine. I darted around grabbing supplies, mostly, after reaching over people to get the monitors on the baby. Did I mention that we just put the baby down on top of a cabinet in the unit that’s full of broken equipment because we didn’t have a bed? So all this excitement was happening in a very small space with people just climbing all over each other. You know, just to make it fun. Somehow we got the baby stabilized. Wow, God. Part of the problem was the baby’s blood sugar was next to nothing because it couldn’t eat. The best part is that it was seen at another hospital the day before and given vaccinations and just sent home like nothing was wrong, like this baby with no upper lip and no ability to eat in any way would be just fine. I don’t know if the baby will make it ultimately, but God was certainly looking out for it in that moment by getting it to us.
So recall that we didn’t have any open beds. None. And we needed to put the new baby somewhere. We did have one baby in the NICU who was ready to go home. He is now a whopping 3 ½ pounds and loves to eat. He is the cutest thing I have ever seen. He looks like he’s made out of chocolate and belongs in an Easter basket. I said I’d take him home with me, but they said no. His parents were coming to get him later on, but we needed the bed now. So our little friend got relocated to a small plastic laundry basket on the nurse’s desk. That’s right, laundry basket. Yep, that’s how we do.
Pray:
Next week there aren’t enough volunteer nurses coming in, so I am going to stay at the hospital overnight so I can work full shifts Monday- Thursday and most of Friday. That’s a lot. Pray that I depend totally on the Lord for it and not myself. Pray that I have patience and peace. Please continue to pray for my body to be strong and healthy.
Pray for me in building relationships with the Haitian staff, I don’t feel like I have been doing a great job at it. It’s really tempting to spend all my energy getting to know the American volunteers that are only there for a week at a time, but I want to invest more in the people that are here all the time. A lot of them speak English so I have no excuse.
This is small, but I’m missing my people back home. Pray for comfort for my heart.
Love y'all.
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