Posts tagged story

I was meeting friends for coffee. I heard the missile coming towards me, though I didn’t see it. I sprinted towards a nearby building. I wasn’t fast enough.

 During the bombing raids, I stay in my room — it’s not worth the effort to go downstairs. This house only has three floors, and the missiles they are using tear right through buildings to the ground. I can’t sleep. All the doors here are broken now and the building next to mine was destroyed. The roads are closed. I don’t know how, but I’ll try to leave the house.

27 Years Old. Leg Shattered. Trapped in Aleppo

“I’m Going to Tell The Whole World”: An HIV “Expert Patient,” In Her Own Words

In 2001, I tested positive for HIV. At that time, I was 25 years old and in a terrible state. I had lost a lot of weight, I was vomiting, had cold and hot rashes and was saying weird things. My whole body was covered with sores and I was confined to a wheelchair. Literally, I was more dead than alive.

In 2004, I started volunteering for an organization that helped people living with HIV/AIDS in Nhlangano, the capital of Shiselweni region. They asked me to share my experiences, and I told people about antiretroviral treatment and what it had done for me.

When I started seeing MSF cars in Nhlangano in 2009, I became curious and asked around. Someone told me what MSF was doing, and immediately I wrote my application letter and was hired as an “expert patient.” My role is to do pre and post-test counseling and to be there for the patients when they need support.

I really like the work with the patients. I know I give them hope by telling my story. Today I am fine. I have a healthy four-year-old boy who is HIV negative. Before I had him, five children I brought to this world had died, each after six months. My older son is 17, and he is well, too. I know what the patients are going through, and telling them my story and how important it is to stick to the treatment encourages them. The other day a young girl even told me I was her role model. That made me very happy.

Photo: Thembi (right) with her two sons
Swaziland 2012 © Irene Jancsy/MSF

Complicated delivery

Our journey back to Kitchanga was difficult. On the morning of our departure, we received a 17 year old girl, Nina, at our health center in Kivuye. Nina was pregnant and her contractions had started the night before. Unfortunately, the baby’s head was in an occipito-transverse position and the labour was failing to progress. This means that the baby’s head was stuck in the pelvis. The road conditions were bad…

We finally arrived after a 3 hour drive. We were received by one of obstetricians, Dr Marie-Josee. Nina was swiftly wheeled into the delivery room. The baby’s head was just visible. The ventouse was tried three times without success. Just before we decided to go for a caesarean section, Nina pushed for the final time. A midwife quickly clambered onto some steps and applied fundal pressure, pressing hard as Nina grunted and cried out. All of a sudden, a little baby girl popped out. She was blue and the cord was around her neck. After brief but intense stimulation, we heard the welcome sound of a baby’s cry.

Nina is now doing ok but both mother and baby are still in hospital. She is actually one of the lucky ones… Happy stories like Nina give us just enough hope to smile and square up to another day.

Xx
Angie Angeline Wee is a Family Physician working in Kitchanga in the North Kivu province of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. This is her second mission with MSF.

MSF Blogs: TB&ME

TB&ME is a collaborative blogging project by patients being treated for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and MSF in locations all around the world. They write about their experiences living with MDR-TB and the treatment that they receive. This treatment can often involve taking upwards of 20 pills a day for 24 months and suffering many painful side effects from the toxic drugs.

TB&ME gives MDR-TB patients an opportunity to tell the world about the issues that affect their lives, about how treatment and services could be improved, and how it feels to have this disease. It also provides an opportunity for patients to tell the world that MDR-TB exists in their own words, that it is a global problem and to share their experiences with others who might be in the same position.

Photo: South Africa 2011 © Samantha Reinders
Phumeza, an XDR-TB patient and TB&ME blogger in South Africa

MSF Blogs: The Flying Creatures I Sleep With

Chris Bird, a former Reuters and Guardian reporter, put down his notepad and left more than 10 years of news reporting to study medicine with the intention of returning to the front lines where he can be hands-on saving lives and alleviating the kind of suffering he once wrote about.

Here he talks about his living situation in Democratic Republic of Congo while working in the field:

We’ve taken over a compound from another aid agency as a temporary MSF base. “Compound,” however, is probably too grand a term for the small single-story building of mud, riddled with termite holes, its bare wooden beams roofed with corrugated iron and surrounded by a flimsy stockade of bamboo.

The strong smell of ammonia pervades the building as it hosts a thriving colony of bats. They’re quiet during the day but, as I turn in, they start to scratch, screech, and shuffle about after returning from sorties to feast on the copious and diverse clouds of insects that race like electrons around the bare bulbs run by a noisy diesel generator at night.

Having learned of a possible association between bats and the dreaded viral hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, I was not happy to find two of them, wings folded, clinging upside down to the mosquito net over my bed. The net is often covered with tiny black pellets each morning—bat poo.

Read his previous blog post here.

Photo: DRC 2011 © Frank Rammeloo/MSF Lulimba Hospital, in the Kimbi Lulenge health zone in South Kivu.

“Now There is Nothing”: Testimonies from Refugees in South Sudan

Amani, who brought her daughter Harrap to the field hospital in Jamam for treatment:

“The rainy season is coming. And the place we are living, it looks like it will be in the water. We need to find another place. I know this soil, and when the rains come this will be a swamp, this will be filled with water… This is a bad place.

My daughter has diarrhea with blood. This problem has been going on for a long time now. It first started in the middle of the fighting. So now she has been ill for a long time. When the fighting started, there was no way for us to get treatment. We were just running, running, always running, until we got here. This is the first time I have been able to get some medical care for her. MSF is the first treatment we have got.”

Photo: South Sudan 2012 © Robin Meldrum
A mother with her child in the Doro refugee camp in South Sudan.