From Hope to Tragedy

Well I don't often blog twice on the same day but I feel obligated to follow through on what happened to the girl in my previous post.

As I mentioned in the last post, she came in with malaria this morning and was treated. She quickly improved and was looking close to being ready to discharge home.

I was getting ready to wrap up some paperwork when I got a call from William that there was a group of wazungu (white people) headed my way. He said he met them on the road and they wanted a tour of the clinic. They arrived just a few minutes later.

I was starting the tour with them when our receptionist came and told me that Kiptoo (our most experienced nurse) needed me NOW. I knew that there was no way Kiptoo would have interrupted a clinic tour for something minor. I rushed to the observation room and found him with emergency resuscitation equipment and our little girl. In medical terms she had crashed.

I gave myself about two seconds to get over the shock and then started in with CPR. We worked on her for a good half hour doing CPR and giving resuscitation drugs before acknowledging that she was gone and there was nothing more we could do.

Her mother told us that right before she got really sick and became unresponsive she told her mom that she had fallen out of a tree that morning but hadn't told anyone at the time. She said that her chest had been hurting since but she didn't say anything because she thought she would be in trouble.

Our staff all came to the conclusion that she must have had internal injuries from the fall. Because her malaria was turning around and we thought things were looking great before she suddenly crashed.

Talk about a rough day! We then had to go out in the hallway and break the news to mom. We took her in my office. It took a while for the fact that her daughter had just died to really settle in. The moment it really hit her she doubled over and began wailing. My eyes filled with tears as I wrapped my arms around her. Days like this are so hard. Yesterday we victoriously helped save a young life, today we lost one....