Monday in Bere

Monday, November 20, 2006

We got a lot accomplished today on the house. All of the floors are poured except for the master bedroom and the great room/living room. Graham and Steve worked all day and got all the base cabinets and pantry cabinets in. Tomorrow they will work on the top cabinets and the counters.

The steel window guards arrived today. That was a surprise. We continue to attract a crowd outside the fence while we work on the house. It grows and grows with each day. Everyone wants to see the Nasara (white people) work.

We had a lot of issues today with the ultrasound. Today was supposed to be the first day of free obstetric ultrasound. James had advertised this by word of mouth and on the local radio station. We had 6 patients today. Most of the ultrasounds were normal. Although, after my first two ultrasounds, the battery went dead on the ultrasound machine. We discussed the fact that we might be able to turn the big generator on, but James didn't want to do that. It uses too much gas. So we got one of the small generators, a 2 stroke POS generator Tiger generator (as said by Peter)(I write this info for my hubby), and a voltage regulator and we blew the power supply. Luckily we had another power supply. We then connected it to the other small generator, a portable 4 Stroke gasoline, 14 HP 7000 watt Generac (again for my hubby) that had been leaking gas and Peter rigged it up temporarily to work. It worked until the generator ran out of gas. I then had enough battery to do the last patient.

We all came back to the house for a meal of Solomon's Eggplant Parmesan. Solomon is the cook that James and Sarah hire. He works from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon. He is a big help while I am helping out at the hospital. In the middle of lunch, James came to get me. He had a woman with a mass in her lower abdomen. She was having heavy bleeding and was extremely tender. She said she wasn't pregnant, but James suspected she was and asked me to confirm it by ultrasound. He considered an ectopic pregnancy, but said her belly was probably too big for that. I went over and Peter tried another rigging of the generator. It didn't work, so Jamie went to find gas for the generator we had it hooked up to before. When it was up and running, I began to scan. It was hard to make heads or tails of what I was seeing at first. But after scanning for a few minutes, I determined that it was a ruptured ectopic pregnancy (a pregnancy in her fallopian tube that had gotten big enough to rupture the tube). She was bleeding internally. There was blood all in her pelvis.

James went to talk to the family. They decided that they didn't want the surgery and none of James' pleading could change their mind. They didn't want to pay for the surgery. So they took her and left. Talk about frustrating. What do you do when a patient's family takes her away from a surgery that would save her life? This woman will die without the surgery. What it comes down to is the family would rather pay for her funeral (about $200 American dollars) than pay for her surgery ($28 American dollars). So we had to let her go knowing tomorrow she would be dead. How do you fight that? Please pray for these people.

Kelli