Posts tagged blog
We advocate for our patients and do everything that we can within our hospital to provide the best standard of care, but it can be quite overwhelming at times when what happens outside of our fences is completely beyond your control.
One of the things I do in these moments to help keep things in perspective, is to take a few moments to walk around the health facilities we have here. I remind myself to focus on all the things that we CAN actually do, and that do make a huge difference.
It is amazing how much is still able to be done right here in our hospital, even with all the constraints on time, resources and people power. At these short stitches in time I just marvel at all the activities that are happening simultaneously at any one moment: you can walk past the ER where people are resuscitated and brought back to life with emergency treatments, then past the out-patient clinics and see patients receiving life-changing mental health counseling and support for the terrible traumas they have endured.
You can stop in at the training tent and see a new generation of dedicated nurses and clinical officers participating so attentively in learning sessions to improve their clinical skills and knowledge, wanting to provide the best standard of care to their patients.
Dr. Saschveen blogs from Tanzania: http://blogs.msf.org/en/staff/blogs/msf-in-tanzania/treating-refugees-in-tanzania-perspective
Two Little Girls
Ian Cross is a doctor from the UK who is currently working at the MSF project in Kutupalong, Bangladesh. The project serves Rohingya refugees who have fled violence in neighbouring Myanmar. Here he tells the stories of two little girls who came for treatment at the clinic…
She didn’t see the soldier who fired the shot. Her father was running from the village carrying her in his arms. Her arms were around his neck. The bullet smashed through her right forearm and entered her father’s head, killing him instantly.
She didn’t talk much about what happened next. She crossed the border in to Bangladesh with her mother and little brother. Her arm was too badly damaged for us to treat in our facility at Kutupalong, so we referred her to the Memorial Christian Hospital, a couple of hours away to the north. The surgeons began by fixing the forearm bones. I reviewed her when she returned to the clinic with her arm in a cast. She couldn’t stretch out her fingers because the extensor tendons in her forearm had been destroyed by the bullet.
After a month or so, she was ready for further surgery to reconstruct the tendons. She came to the clinic this morning, proud to show me the result. She could waggle her fingers. She was delighted. Her mother was so grateful for the treatment she received that she asked us to tell the world what had happened to her daughter. How can you be shot through the eye and remain alive? This little girl didn’t see who shot her either.
The bullet entered her skull obliquely, in front of her right ear. The bullet traversed her eyeball and exited through the side of her nose. The eye was completely destroyed of course. The surgeons repaired a hole an inch across between her eye socket and the brain. The sight in her left eye is normal. Although she was unfortunate to have been shot, she was incredibly lucky to survive.
These two little girls managed to reach Bangladesh and received excellent care. But how many more died before they were able to leave Myanmar?
Read more from Ian: http://blogs.msf.org/en/staff/authors/ian-cross
Before the sun had risen, before the world was told, we were there preparing and implementing. This time we were not going to be behind Ebola, we were putting up defenses and we were getting ready to fight.
Three words we all knew: **** you, Ebola
One day while their house was being hit by coalition forces, the boy’s father and uncle, in concern for their little boy, jumped on top of him to protect him. For me it highlighted that a family in Yemen is much the same as a family in New Zealand or Australia. What father or uncle doesn’t want to protect their son or nephew? And in this case they literally put their bodies between the blast and him. Unfortunately, he was still quite burnt down one side of his body, but he will recover with no significant scarring, according to our doctors. I’d never before seen the level of casualties I saw in Saada.
Michael Seawright, MSF Project Coordinator in Yemen http://bit.ly/20tfn2k
It won’t be New York, Tokyo, Australia or Hawaii, but rather South Sudan, Afghanistan, Congo or Syria. It won’t be peak season, beach weather and tourist attractions that are going to determine my destinations, but rather hunger crises, epidemics, war and natural catastrophes.
This month, I have taken up my two-year contract with the MSF Emergency Unit. From now on, I have to be ready to leave for emergency missions within a couple of days. No sooner said than done… while unsuspectingly attending an epidemics training in Paris, my phone rings during the five-minute break and I am told where I will spend the next two to three months: Ethiopia.
Musings on Joy
“I have come to realize that my place in the world is not a geographical location, it is who I am and how I interact with the world – this MSF life has given me the chance to interact in a way which does not place importance on nationality, race, religion but on humanity.”
I have been teaching English here. An odd thing for a water and sanitation expert to do. Engineers are not known for their abilities with the written and spoken word. But the thing about MSF is that you can’t ever predict what will happen and what skills you’ll offer to make projects run smoothly. A few days ago I walked past the kitchen, and one of the women I teach had written the alphabet in the sand to practice. Whilst disinfecting a ward, two women were testing each other on the days of the week. In a profession that is notorious for frustration, feeling a strong sense of tangible results is a gift I’m lucky to have experienced.
MSF’s outgoing international president, Dr. Unni Karunakara, left Sunday on a journey by bicycle from one end of India to the other. It’s a 3,000+ mile (5000 km) journey that Unni will use to spark a dialogue on health, healthcare, and humanitarianism. You can follow his progress here: https://www.cycleformsf.in/unnicycles/
Photo by Lynsey Addario/VII
A woman waits to be transported to the MSF hospital to have her second c-section in Bo, Sierra Leone.
A doctor blogs from the same hospital about a different patient: “She had delivered this baby at home over 36 hours before. The baby was doing well but she had not delivered the placenta and had started hemorrhaging. She had to walk an hour and a half to the nearest clinic to get an ambulance to take her to the hospital. When she arrived she was only semi-conscious, covered in blood, and her hemoglobin was only 3.1.” Read blog- http://msf.me/19GFsSo
She is on the brink of killing herself and then (thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness) she phones our councellor Kural.
Photo © Stefan Kruger
An injured child needs specialized neurosurgical care in #Afghanistan and the hospital is more than 200 miles away over bad roads and insecure areas. What do you do? http://bit.ly/14vssdE
MSF Logistician Ben King building kites with the community. Afghanistan 2013 © Ben King
“My vision of this country before I arrived saw kites flying everywhere, filling the air with the exuberance of small boys interacting with others far beyond the high walls of their own compounds. A kind of invisible communication that creates infinitely strong bonds between the people and their country. My visions were true when I arrived, but as the temperatures began to plummet, the kites, one by one, disappeared from the crystal clear skies. Finally, though, it was our chance to try our hand at it…
For now, I will enjoy watching them dance about as a beacon of hope for a brighter future for this ever colourful and complex land”
Read more from Ben’s blog and leave questions and comments below his post.
The ladies receive flowers from the Khodjeily MoH at the day of handover © Emily Wise
Up until now, my position in the Karakpakstan project has been as the doctor in the Khodjeily district. I took the baton in the short run-up to our handing Khodjeily back over to the Karakalpakstan Ministry of Health (MoH). Already by the time of my arrival, things were running pretty impressively in Khodjeily, and at times I have felt frustrated that there has not been a great deal for me to do. All of the hard-graft had already been done by my predecessors: doctors Jan (from what I can ascertain, some kind of Canadian medical God) and Johanna (an organisational guru). So, by the time I arrived in Khodjeily there was little left for me to do. No heroic lifesaving. No stamping my mark. No making a gigantic difference to rapturous applause. Great for the programme. Great for the patients. Khodjeily is a real success story. But for me, working in Khodjeily has always felt akin to sleeping with someone else’s husband.
And now my time has come: I am handing-over Khodjeily and opening the district geographically beyond. Shumanay is virtually uncharted territory for us: I believe MSF last ventured there in 2003. How many cases of TB will there be? How many will be drug-resistant? What is the state of TB-care in Shumanay? I am granted an MSF dream team for the job: joining Marielle and I will be our national nurse, Sarbinaz, and counsellor, Koral, both of whom are industrious, kind and capable. We will be starting from scratch. Shumanay will be our baby. We travel the hour and a half to Shumanay for the first time and survey the environment. It is similar to the rest of Karakalpakstan – flat, barren and parched plains without undulation as far as the eye can see, small shack houses and Lada cars kept just about road-worthy since Soviet days. But it’s even more remote, rural and sparsely populated than I have previously experienced. I can practically hear the untreated mycobacteria TB bacilli singing to me from the houses. This is a fine land.
Supposed to be on my 4 th year at University right now, most of my friends are going to be graduates this year and I’m not even close to that. Guess everything happens for a reason, but for this I don’t see any reason why it have to be so damn hard. But again I guess it’s those lessons that ‘life is not easy’ but really does it have to be this hard?? Mmhhh. Maybe it will be a happy new year, the day they say I’m actually cured from XDR (be it in June/July) for me that would be a HAPPY NEW YEAR.
Rape is a crime that affects many aspects of human life; it is a medical emergency, it is a psychological trauma and it has deep consequences on both family and societal level. It is of utmost importance that survivors of rape have access to immediate medical and psychological care, and also for the sake of preventing sexual violence altogether in a long-term perspective it is important that women’s rights in general are improved.
- Page 1 of 5
- Next »