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Showing posts with label 3rd degree burns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 3rd degree burns. Show all posts

Friday, February 5, 2016

Prayer request /positive vibes (if you don't pray)

We have a burned lady patient, who had 3rd degree burns on her thighs, buttocks and lower back. Really bad. You can see pictures here (not for the faint of heart) and read more about it here.

She was at home for 6 weeks after the accident (her house caught fire and her dress caught fire as she was fleeing), then she came to us and has been here a month. Not in a state-of-the-art burnt unit, with filtered air, sterile everything and no contact with the outside world (full of germs). No, she is in a filthy building with 10 other patients in the same room, laying in filthy sheets, with flies and mosquitoes, dirt and grime.

She is our miracle lady, somehow still alive, not infected, not septic.

However, she is getting a pressure sore on her tail bone and if it gets necrotic, that's harder to heal than her burns.

She also had malaria and didn't eat/drink for days because everything she'd swallow would come back out.

She's doing better now and I've decided to start "force feeding" her. I bring her food and don't go away until she's eaten. But she's going to need a lot of food to regain her strength and grow all the new skin she needs to grow.

Someone said it would probably be better for her to die now, because they couldn't see her surviving and it was just more suffering until she died. I am determined that she will live. She would have died already if she was supposed to die. She's fought this far. I'm gonna help her fight the rest of the way (or until I leave, at least).

Please pray for her. Her name is Adamah.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Miracles

Most of our patients get post-op infections. It's a fact of life. In Tchad, if you get a paper cut and don't soak it in alcohol several times a day, it will get infected.

We have a patient who was in a house fire. Her buttocks, lower back and thighs suffered 3rd degree burns. She came to us 6 weeks after the fire, clearly in a lot of pain, but somehow not infected. Not septic. Not dying.

We did 2 small skin grafts on her, and they took beautifully. It covers only a tiny portion of her burns, but it's progress. Her back has some granulating tissue. Incredibly and against all odds, she is healing.

If that's not a miracle, I don't know what is.