You know all the advances made in medicine when we discovered sterilization and the concept of keeping things not only clean, but actually sterile? Well, that phase in human history skipped Chad entirely.
We do our best to sterilize instruments, but there are flies *inside* the OR. They're not quite as cooperative as interns when you yell at them to keep their hands off the sterile field.
Yesterday, a lady who had a tib-fib fracture was getting septic, so the only thing to do was to cut her leg off. The infection had spread far above the fracture site, so it was an above-knee amputation.
Another discovery that skipped Chad entirely was the concept of full-narcosis. We don't have a ventilator (or the appropriate drugs) so the amputation (and all other surgeries) are done under ketamine, but the patients are awake and moving around. Talking. Watching.
The lady with the amputated leg had an abcess going even further up from the amputation site, so today we had to unwrap her, poke around and wash it out. Our only desinfectant is a preparation of water and 25% bleach.
The only pain killer is Tylenol.
Take a few moments to digest that last phrase...
I did the dressing change on her today. We have sterile gauze, but the patients actually have to go buy it at the pharmacy, because we don't have enough funding to give them all the gauze they need. So as a family member went to buy more gauze, I was standing by the bed to keep the flies off her wound and trying not to look at her face.
I washed it as best I could, with an audience, as all the other patients (there are 16 beds per ward, we have 2 wards) watched. Tomorrow, I will do the same thing, and pray that the infection can be kept under control so that we can eventually close her wound and she won't die of sepsis.
I took a picture, so you can have a better idea of what I'm talking about, but you might not want to look if you have a weak stomach...
...and just in case you were wondering, no, that basin is not sterile, neither were my gloves or the instruments I used (we keep those strictly for surgeries).
If you got this far and you're horrified, welcome to the club. Unfortunately, this is the best we can do. The hospital runs entirely on donations, and we have barely any equipment at all. Stuff that the hospitals in the US and Europe throw away, we would be over the moon to get. A surgery runs somewhere between $30-$50 dollars. If anybody feels inclined to help, ANYTHING helps. $5 dollars would buy enough sterile gauze for one patient for a week. Might not seem much, but that could be the difference between life and daeth from sepsis... and some patients literally cannot even afford that...
Alright, I'll stop talking, but please, please, please: HELP!
Here's a link where you can donate: http://www.ahiglobal.org/main/donate-now/
(Just make sure you specify that your donation it is for the Surgical Center of Moundou, Chad).
Thank you.
