You’re wondering where the photos are from my vacation? Well, unfortunately, they don’t exist. My vacation was canceled due to a ridiculous amount of work that needed to be accomplished in a short amount of time. I’m over it.
The child I mentioned in the last post, remains hospitalized. Going on week number seven now. Just within the past week they have finally come up with a diagnosis, and have started a pretty intensive treatment for him. He’ll remain in the hospital for at least another two weeks, as he requires some pretty serious IV medications. The poor kid has had just about enough of the hospital by now, and all of our nurses from our clinic that have been going in to care for him day and night are drained. The nurses from the hospital are wiped as well. I’ve been pretty much living in the hospital with him for the past several weeks – just to be around to talk to the doctors and take care of sending different tests to different labs. Unfortunately they have had to do several tests for him that they are unable to perform right there in the hospital. So that leaves us running all over the city in taxis and buses with blood work and other types of samples, to find labs that are able to do them for us.
Being the one responsible for coordinating his case on our end, has proven to be both physically and emotionally draining. He obviously is pretty sick, and it’s been difficult watching him deteriorate. You can also tell he’s 13-years-old by the way he acts. To put it nicely – he’s a punk. Often times won’t listen to what anybody tells him. Gets mad when the nurses have to put IVs in him. Then once they’re in, he pulls them out. One might say it seems as though he enjoys making life difficult for others – more than likely stemming from inner anger. So, as we all fight for his life, he fights against us. He says he doesn’t want to die, yet won’t cooperate with the medical tests and treatments. The thing is that he usually gives in after some time of resisting. It’s draining for us to keep on insisting to get him to do even the simplest of things, example – to take his medications. Everything has to be explained 100% correctly to him before he’ll agree to anything. Whenever he arrived to do whatever type of exam, and just one little thing hadn’t been explained, he’d refuse to have it done. We’d take him to tests up to three times before he’d agree. I know, sounds ridiculous, right? There were many moments when we just wanted to give up – just tired of fighting with him. But, we knew what giving up meant. They had to take him to the OR to do some more tests – oh, he didn’t like that. After I spent much time explaining to him what they would do and why they had to do it, and what the consequences were if he didn’t let them do it, he finally agreed – until about 10 minutes before they were ready to take him. He wigged out big time – we ended up having to pin him down to give him IV valium to relax him enough to get him to surgery.
It gets better. Just after I gave him the valium (while he has a look of terror on his face, telling me to stop shooting him up because he doesn’t want to die – that broke my heart into about 1000 pieces), the surgeon tells me that we’ll have to wait to be last to enter the OR, because the child has a blood-borne disease and they don’t want to infect the OR. Fine. But I had already broken down once after I shot him up with Valium, I wasn’t looking forward to doing that again (I was beyond exhausted – this all happened at 8pm, and I’d been up since 4am with him). So we sit around for 3 hours, and finally we’re told that they aren’t going to operate on him at all. Well que bella. There were a couple possible reasons running through my head – 1) Surgical team is afraid of contracting HIV during surgery, or 2) Surgeon wants to make more money on the surgery, and for that reason offered to operate the following morning at a private hospital. Really, either could be true. However, the surgeons excuse was excuse #1. We didn’t leave the hospital that night until midnight.
So, we take him to the private hospital in the morning, the surgery went fine. He was in recovery, waking up. The surgeon comes in and tells me that he hadn’t, until this very moment as he was flipping through the chart, seen the CT results. The surgeon was aware, prior to surgery that he was operating because of the results we had gotten back from that CT. Then, as he hands me the tissues samples he retrieved during surgery (not even the correct samples that were supposed to be retrieved based on those CT results), I notice the samples weren’t put into the correct solution. This meant that the pathologist in the lab was not going to be able to perform half of the tests that were ordered by the specialists in the hospital. Due to a prior error of the same nature with another one of our children, I had spoken directly to the pathologist at the lab, and he told me step by step what needed to be done with the samples. I had explained that to the surgeon in complete detail. It really was not that complicated. I guess it went in one ear, and right out the other. The specialists were NOT pleased with that news.
What a long and complicated history for this poor kid…he’ll be hospitalized for at least another 2 weeks.
About a week and a half ago, we heard news of a pretty serious car accident that three volunteers and a teacher from our school had been in. They were on their way to Danli for the weekend, as the town prepared for its Festival de Maiz. They were hitchhiking, as volunteers here tend to do (it’s quite common in Honduras for people to travel in the back of pickup trucks). They were all thrown out of the back, as the driver lost control going around a mountain curve. Everybody pulled through – nobody came out with extremely serious injuries. Lots of broken bones, large abrasions, broken tendons and ligaments and gashes. Luckily, another driver that passed just after the accident picked them up and brought them into the city, about a 45-minute drive. Good thing one of the volunteers is a nurse from our clinic, a dear friend of mine, therefore she’s somewhat familiar with the hospitals in Tegucigalpa. She overheard somebody in the truck say “bring them to Hospital Escuela” which is the underfunded, under equipped public teaching hospital. She quickly responded negatively to that, and insisted they be brought to a private hospital. All are now either back at the Ranch, or at home with their families, recovering.
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