Yesterday was a great day!
Why? You may recall from my blog
entry last month (click here to read it) that we had a visiting maxillofacial
surgeon with us for a short while.
During his clinic on the Saturday, we saw a baby girl (we’ll called her
Ache, not her real name) with a haemangioma on her face that covered her left
eye and a lot of her left cheek. Here’s
how Ache looked when we first saw her:
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| Ache - 23rd June 2018 |
Well yesterday, her parents came back in for follow
up. It was a bit of a fluke (or was it?)
that I bumped into them while they were here, because I’m often not in the
consultation clinic and don’t see patients.
However we crossed paths as they were leaving the hospital and they came
to show me the baby’s face. The simple
treatment of propranolol is working! It
was so great to see how much the haemangioma has reduced already in just one
month. There’s still a lot of time and
medication required until it disappears completely. But the parents are overjoyed. The mother, a beautiful young Arab girl
dressed in colourful clothes, bracelets and necklace, was beaming. The father, an older Arab man, couldn’t stop
saying ‘shukran’ (thank you). With my
limited Arabic I couldn’t really converse with them, apart from replying
‘afwan’ (you’re welcome) and ‘da adil’ (that’s great). The gratitude was evident despite us not exchanging
many words. It was a humbling experience
to know that a simple treatment such as propranolol was making such a
difference to this young girl’s life.
The father gave me the rest of the tablets he bought last time and I cut
more up for them to take home and continue the treatment for another couple of
months. We urged them to come back and
let us know how Ache is getting on. As
I’ll be on home assignment when they come back, I handed over the propranolol
dosing and tablet-cutting to my Chadian pharmacist colleague and introduced him
to the family. This will mean they can
get more tablets cut up when they return for follow-up. Because the tablets are 40mg and the child
only requires 1/8th of a tablet per day at the moment, the box of 50
tablets which the father bought on their first visit is lasting a long
time. Bargain treatment, as the whole
box of 50 tablets cost around £3!
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| Ache - 24th July 2018 |
Carrying on with my update of my last blog, I’m sure you’re
all riveted as to what happened in the end with the pit latrines!! Well, all the bottles and nappies got removed
(by hand using shovels) and buried. A local
septic-tank-emptying company came and emptied the pit. Alphonse our hospital handyman, along with
two guys to help him, re-laid the floors in each of the 3 latrines and put a thin
metal bar across the hole down into the long-drop to try and stop people
pushing bottles and nappies down there.
We can but hope…..
Oh, and I managed to curb the enthusiasm of the physio and
we just ordered 30 pairs of crutches rather than the 95 pairs he wanted! They’ve been made and delivered to the
hospital ready to help with the rehab of our orthopaedic patients.
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