Cancer

I mentioned on the last post that I was overwhelmed and tired because Tchad is hard and sometimes it gets to you.

Adorable 9-year old girl, Caroline, cones in carried by her dad. Skinny kid, but not malnourished, just normal skinny. Then she lifts up her skirt, and her thigh, just one of them, is larger than mine. It's a hard mass and it hurts when we move/touch it.

The only thing to do is to amputate her leg. So we schedule surgery for the next day.

We get into the OR and I'm already sad enough as it is, but this thing was scary. We only had one unit of blood available for her, and there were massive veins you could see through the skin. Crazy.

Upon further inspection, her lymph nodes were swollen in the arms, neck and groin, which is a good sign the cancer had already spread. We have no image studies (except x-rays and even that has to be done at the public hospital) and no pathology. No way to know for sure.

Dr. Scott makes a superficial skin incision, just a couple of inches long. And it bleeds, it bleeds, it bleeds. He tamponades it with a wad of gauze, and it immediately soaks up through the gauze. He presses it for a while and it just keeps bleeding. Eventually, the bleeding slows down enough, that he can suture it shut. It was only a skin incision!!!!!!

There was no way to go deeper. She would have bled out in minutes. There was no way to amputate. Even then, the cancer has probably metastasized to several places. We had to send her home. There are no treatment options in Tchad.  

We also had an elderly man with a giant mass in his prostate, also inoperable. And a young woman, with a baby actually breastfeeding while she was examined, with a giant mass on her face, probably a tumor of the nasal passages, which will erode her sphenoidal bone straight into her brain.

And there was a middle-aged woman with a lump on her neck. Lymph nodes swollen all over. Checked her abdomen, and she had palpable masses throughout.

Basically, cancer sucks. And there's a lot of it here, I don't know why. Little kids, adults, elderly people. And they *always* come when it's giant and you just can't do anything anymore.

The pictures below are of Caroline's leg.

Compare the diameter of her two legs

Notice the size of the veins