Thanksgiving

We continue to be stretched daily in our medical knowledge and abilities here, but God has been faithfully providing what we need to care for our patients.

This is the Men's Ward.  This photo was taken just after Chuck rounded on the 32 patients with the team of residents and nurse practitioner students.  The beds line both sides of the room and extend into an extra room at the end of the middle walkway.  Each patient has a family member that serves as a caregiver to provide food, clean clothes, bathe the patient, etc.  The nurses are only able to provide the direct medical care (IV fluids, medications, vital signs, draw blood, etc).

This chest x-ray is from a 24 year old boy with TB pericarditis.  He presented with shortness of breath, chest pain, and edema.  He has a large pericardial effusion (fluid around the heart) that is seen on the chest x-ray and confirmed by echocardiogram.  Chuck did a pericardiocentesis (needle into the sac around the heart) on him and got bloody fluid back.  He was also found to be HIV positive and this makes the pericardial effusion likely to be due to tuberculosis.  We have actually seen quite a few pericardial effusions like this recently and the challenge is making the firm diagnosis of TB in order to qualify for the TB medications from the government-funded treatment program.

Chuck had a big success story from last week.  A 17 year old boy presented to the hospital with severe anemia after having bloody stools for 3 days (melena).  Chuck did an EGD and found an actively bleeding duodenal ulcer.  He had the pharmacy mix up an epinephrine solution and loaded the new injector into the scope.  He then removed the loose clot on top of the ulcer and injected the epinephrine around the ulcer and the bleeding stopped.  Just after the procedure, the boy dropped his blood pressure and had to be resuscitated in the EGD room.  By the grace of God, three days later, he walked out of the hospital with no bleeding and feeling much better.  This photo shows Gideon and Emmanuel who work in the EGD room holding the injector and the scope.

Yes, that is a snake in a bottle.  Lindsay was on call a few nights ago and got the call that a child was presenting with a snakebite to the face.  The family brought the snake in to the hospital in this bottle and Nesoah (surgery resident) is examining it in this picture.  It was decided that it was indeed a green mamba, but that the bite had not released venom.  We don't have many snakebites here so the antivenom is not always readily available, but thankfully it was that night (even though they ended up not needing it).  Green mambas can be incredibly deadly, but they usually like to hide and stay away from humans.

This is Angela with Chuck Miller.  Chuck is an 82 year old pediatrician who came to work for 2 months at Mbingo with us.  He has an amazing story of clearly feeling God's call to the mission field around the time of his wife's death and has been busy doing mission work around the world ever since.  In fact, he was heading to South Sudan just weeks after leaving Mbingo.  We pray that God will continue to use him through caring for children around the world.

This week was Thanksgiving at our church.  It is quite different than what we are used to.  There was a point in the service when people walked to the front to give their offering of money or produce.  Many people at the church have almost no money, but are farmers and can bring their "first fruits" to give to God.  After the service, the produce was sold to other members of the church with the money going into the offering.  This picture shows the "auctioneer" taking bids for this basket of corn.

This is Isaac and Barry playing in a puddle down the street from our house.  Barry is the son of one of the medical residents and is about the same age as Isaac.  They chased each other, picked up rocks, and dipped leaves into the different puddles until they were both dirty and worn out.

Thanks for following along with our adventures here at Mbingo Baptist Hospital.  We thank God for the opportunities that He gives us to serve here on a daily basis.