NOVEMBER 1, 2016

Dear diary, so much has changed but it appears nothing much has changed but the names of our patients. Smiles fill the faces of many and sadness greets more. The evil that men do slaps them in the face and their mothers are too scared to stand up for them. Today, on the registration bench I got a news and it stuck me to the floor. Some of our patients had died before the results could reach them.

A patient for whom we were to do an urgent PCV had died. How had I known? One of our IT students told me. The previous day, she had gone to dispatch a result in the trauma lab and the nurses had asked her to go and dispatch in the mortuary. Yes, the mortuary! The nurses had asked her to go and dispatch in the mortuary. I stood there shocked, imagining the look on the nurses faces as they conveniently shifted blames to the students. I stood there watching them, glued to the ground, wishing we had dispatched earlier. No, maybe they were right but it didn’t matter anymore; all that mattered was that someone had died and we couldn’t do anything to stop the death storm that hit him.

One thing that amazes me so much about working in the hospital is the miracle of healing that I see on a daily basis performed through our medical personnel. As to what I hate, it is the hopelessness of  many situations. It is the hopelessness of a 100% burns patient who gets admitted in the trauma unit of the hospital and the medical personnel have nothing to do but to watch the 3 year old Kosi breathe her last in a troubled sleep. No, that’s not hopelessness. Hopelessness is when 4 children from one family are roasted in a ghastly gas explosion and their parents watch them die one after the other. Hopelessness is when you walk into the trauma lab and you find request forms of patients who you know will die in a matter of minutes but you have to do the tests anyway. Hopelessness is when you walk into the trauma unit to collect blood sample from an 80% patient in obvious pain subdued by the unconsciousness of coma, looking like a 200 level cadava and you watch the parents frantically paying all the bills all the while knowing that he will never make it but borrowing to pay not for him, but for themselves. To comfort themselves when he must have passed away that they had done their best.

What then is hope? Hope for me is walking into the burns extension to find an 8 year old roasted and writhing in pain live long enough to turn 9, moulded and toughened by pain. The once weak and fragile little girl who would scream and whine dramatically before we took her sample had changed, though not much physically but mentally and psychologically. She had learned to endure and rise beyond her pain. Tears nearly rolled down my cheeks when she generously gave me her arm to take as much blood as I needed. She even pointed the veins out to me and I stood there starring at the little girl for whom the hospital had become a home. I stood there, my nostrils covered with a nose mask for the fluids oozing out of their bodies mixed in the air to give the place a natural stinking smell….yes but the patients survived. It was their smell and they inhaled powerfully defying death. Yes, she’ll live. I pray she does.