I haven't written here in quite a while. The 3rd year of med school was really hard, and after my last time in Chad, I was not in a good place emotionally, which made it all even more difficult. At the end of the year, we have an exam that is the equivalent of Step 1 in the US, which allows us to pass on to clinical rotations during 4th year. Here med school is 6 years, 3 basic sciences and 3 of rotations.
It was hard, but I passed, bought a house (no joke!) and went on vacation for 5 weeks through Central America (Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica and Panama) which did wonders for my mental health. I came back rested and feeling better than I had in a while. Ready to start rotations.
However, as luck would have it, my 1st rotation was OB/GYN. And I started to have flashbacks from Chad. From hemorrhaging mothers and ruptured uteruses, and dead babies. More than once, I had to force myself to think of something else, look out the window and distract myself, so as to not start crying. Nobody here, the residents, attendings, fellow students, know that I've been to Chad and have seen more tragic outcomes in 6 weeks than they will see in their entire careers. As an inexperienced med student with no way to process any of it, and in a setting so poor in resources, than even if I had known what to do, I wouldn't have had the materials necessary to do it.
But let's skip over my 4 months in OB/GYN and jump forward to today. I have now started a 3-week rotation in Neonatology, before moving onto Pediatrics. And today we had a class and sim-lab for neonatal resus. I held it together by forcing myself to concentrate and actually learn everything I could, practicing manual ventilation and intubation, and learning all PEEP and PIP parameters.
At the end of the class, I walked out quickly, trying to hold back the tears. I couldn't stop thinking of one baby in particular, in Chad, who was born alive but died while I auscultated his diminishing heartbeats. That moment will be etched in my memory forever. The feeling. The shock. The numbness that followed. The only ambu bag we had was pediatric, which the nurse was trying to use but I don't think our efforts at ventilating were at all successful. The OB/GYN was busy trying to save the mother's life. I had no idea what to do, and there was no one else. I *know* that there was nothing else I could have done. But right now, I feel like I killed that baby. I feel like I should've been better prepared. And I'm fairly certain that, had that baby been born in a hospital with a NICU, or at least a neonatologist and better equipment, that baby would not have died.
THE UNFAIRNESS OF THIS WORLD MAKES ME INCREDIBLY ANGRY AND SAD.
(Sorry for yelling, but I can't help it.)
The world in 2018 is a disaster, and instead of improving, everything is going to hell. Instead of having a better division of resources, we're polarizing more and more. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are struggling to stay alive. The feeling of impotence and the anger at the world, at the leaders, at the greed of the richest and the apathy of...pretty much everyone (myself included) is getting to me. We need to do better. *I* need to do better.
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