Hey again! This will be the last update from me before I head out into the real bush, the swamps/jungles of the Gulf province of PNG. We are taking a team out “on patrol” as they call it to visit a few villages up the river. Kapuna hospital does this once every month or two in order to reach people that live too far to come to the hospital for basic health care. I think we’ll probably be treating a lot of malaria, diarrheal illnesses, giving vaccines and doing check-ups for children and pregnant women. Our team is made of Manar and I, who will function as the two doctors, three nurses and one or two nursing students. Seeing as how we’re only taking one of our wood-bottomed boats (supposed to hold eight people and all our supplies) I’m a little nervous we’ll be bailing a lot of water out of the bottom. I’m pretty sure we’re exceeding whatever weight limit it has. It’s exciting though because it will give me a chance to see (and live) how most PNGians live. I’ll pretend I’m on Survivor. Right now we’re supposed to be back on Friday but that could always change.
We had a nice relaxing weekend and didn’t spend as much time in the hospital. Saturday afternoon the girls had a volleyball game using a net hung between two bamboo poles. They’re much better than I am…although I had a whole audience of locals and patients laughing at me when I missed a serve at the beginning of the game. After I got warmed up, though, I did okay.:)
We were also lucky to have a woman named Debbie stay with us over the weekend. She’s a mission worker from New Zealand who works with her husband down the river doing Bible translation, and is probably the most talkative person I’ve ever met. Since she’s been in the country on and off for about twenty years, she was able to share a lot of stories about her work and about the culture of PNG in general with us. It’s great to be able to learn from the lives of so many people I’ve met on this trip so far. She also loves to cook so I didn’t have to do a thing involving the stove all weekend. She’s coming back in a week, so I told her that she could stay for as long as she wanted!
Today I finally got to see and manage my own patients on hospital rounds, which was nice now that I’ve started to figure out how this tropical medicine works. We treat a whole lot of patients for malaria, but we treat based on their fever pattern and a few other signs and symptoms, not based on a diagnostic test. Because of this, it seems like there’s a lot more malaria than there probably actually is, but since chloroquine is plentiful and cheap we go ahead and treat all of these patients anyway. I’ve gotten to do a lot of dressing changes and we drained an abscess in an infected hand yesterday…but of course I’m still waiting for more babies to be born! We had a short little education session for all the new moms today which was kind of cool, and talked to them about breastfeeding, when to introduce new foods, and hygiene. We also give all of the new moms books for their baby which contain a vaccination chart, doctor’s note section, and growth curves to keep a record of weight and height. You’d think that these would be lost or ruined in most households, but it’s amazing to me how many parents bring these books with even their teenagers to the hospital…there’s really much more well-child health than I was expecting!
Being here a week I’ve really gotten to see how God has been working in the healing of a lot of patients. We had a couple of children in particular last week who were so dehydrated and not able to wake up and drink that I thought they probably wouldn’t make it. Over the weekend one recovered enough to be sent home today and the other one was awake and eating. I thought that was pretty cool considering we don’t even have IV hydration supplies at the moment. It just goes to show that prayer and God’s healing are very present and powerful here with our really limited resources.
Well I’m off to head to the market to see if they have anything interesting to buy. They mainly just sell food, but it’s really cheap so I like going to look around. You can buy a huge bunch of greens for about 10 cents, and a whole crab for the equivalent 30 cents! Unfortunately I can’t recognize most of what’s for sale and so I usually stick to the basics.