Wednesday, July 10, 2013

In the States we find comfort that if something medical really has to be done, it will be done.  The Rwandan people don't have that luxury. If something medical has to be done & there isn't a qualified person to do it at the  nearest hospital, then options quickly dissolve. Most everyone is too poor to be transferred - that translates to paying for transportation, hospital stay, bringing along the family to feed & care for them, not to mention being 6-8+ hours away from home & being out of work for extended amounts of time.  So there are times when it is required that the doc here at Kibogora has to make the difficult call to transfer a patient, deny a patient, or just try. 

Today Joel chose to try. 

It was a case he has not been trained for .... He's read 15 chapters about it in the past couple days & today prayed hard knowing he is completely inadequate but that God's grace is completely sufficient.  And it was a success!  The operation was on a young man with a broken arm. Both ulna & radius were broken & misaligned.  It wouldn't be enough to just put a cast on it because it would have healed improperly & the man wouldn't have been able to rotate his arm - an important ability in a culture where everyone does  manual labor to feed the family.  Joel needed to place pins through the bones. He literally made a cut at the elbow & at the break, then used an awl to bore through the bone into the marrow.  I'm sure this is common for ortho surgeons, but joel reports it was tougher than he imagined it to be to get that awl through .... And several times he was afraid he had bored right through the other side of the bone, instead of into the marrow.   When they saw the rod poke through the marrow at the point of the break he did a celebration dance in his heart!  The final x ray showed the pins perfectly placed.  This will hopefully translate into a functional arm for the young man in the future.  Glory to God for His grace for our inadequacies! 

Also today was a baby who had an abscess on his eye that needed draining, a 7 year old with a horrible abscess on his hand to be drained, a man whose hand abscess had gone too far & Joel had to amputate his finger....  he's done over 20 cases in this first week. 

The kids & I had fun down in the pediatric unit this afternoon. Our new friend,  Yasmine, is from the UK & is a peds nurse volunteering nearly the exact length of time we are.  We joined her in going down to play with those kids who are stuck at the hospital for weeks on end - sometimes there just because their sibling is sick. So we sang silly songs with them, played ring around the rosey, duck duck goose & tried to learn a few names.  They had a lot of fun & so did we!