Some good tidings….

We Africans are known round the world for our spiritually, and unshaken belief in a higher being of some sort. On a ward round, my first question to parents is, “How is your child?” Normally in the UK, I will get a definite answer, either “he/she has a fever, or he/she is getting better”, In Uganda parents reply “ Doctor, he/she will be fine” regardless of how sick the child is they mostly reply “ He/she will get well Doctor”. As a westerner as well I sometimes wonder if this unshaken faith is denial, naivety, far -fetched or irrational but some of events this week have shown me the power of positive thinking. For instance I lamented so much about the heat and now we are officially in the rainy season! Constant torrential downpour, I suppose I should have been careful what I wished for. I shall no longer complain about the weather I promise.

Street art in down town Jinja

A couple of events this week have been nothing short of miracles and I thought I should share them with you. Last week I wrote about the hospital and some of the challenges limiting adequate provision of care to the children e.g. lack of resources. During our week of oxygen scarcity or should I say drought, we admitted a 12 year old boy who was very unwell with fevers, seizures and was in a coma (completely unresponsive) on admission. He also had respiratory distress, needed oxygen, ideally he should be on an intensive care unit and would have had a list of investigations as long as my arm. Unfortunately we had no oxygen, he was too ill for transfer nor could he be transported to the main hospital to have some of the investigations I would have deemed imperative in the UK and of course we don’t have an intensive care unit here at Jinja paediatric Hospital, so instead we got a full blood count, we already knew he was HIV positive and at risk of opportunistic infections so we treated every infection possible covering fungal/viral and bacterial meningitis. For the last 2 weeks we have been seeing him on the ward round every morning with no real response to treatment, each day the local paediatrician will say to me, “he will wake up soon”. I must confess I very much doubted it and had prepared myself for his “passing”. However, this week this young lad did “wake up”, he is not speaking yet but he is alert and looking around much to my surprise and delight.

I love this colourful house

Across the bed from him is a wee lad who was found on the street by a good Samaritan – again, this 5-year-old boy was found unconscious, salivating, with unresponsive fixed pinpoint pupils and signs suggesting a chest infection as well. Now if this was in the UK, I would not have guessed what the diagnosis was but my very learned colleagues here correctly diagnosed organophosphate poisoning and by some miracle we had one of the antidotes; we also treated his chest infection. A day later this little boy was much better, he could walk around and introduce himself to me in good English. He told us his age! From chatting to him the nursing staff found out that his parents live 3 hours away from the hospital and that he had been missing from home for a while. He most likely was living on the streets and had eaten contaminated food products he found in desperation. To cut the story short, it turns out this boy was kidnapped over 2 weeks ago and his parents were searching for him, and after social and security checks we were able to re-unite him with his family! 

Fishing boats by the source of the nile.

Amidst the doom and gloom of high childhood mortality (total count of 9 deaths so far in the last fortnight), severe malnutrition and poverty; happy endings like these are also occurring and such occurrences make me so pleased to be here.