Food Poisoning

Yesterday was my first full day back to the clinic after two weeks of being gone for my PMTCT class. As I approached the clinic I quickly noticed a group of people sitting on the benches outside. It's pretty unusual for us to have patients when we open at 8AM. They usually start flowing in around 9:30 after taking care of the kids, and farm/home issues.

Well it seems that one of the dormitories for the ELI boarding school had contracted food poisoning. We had 25 girls with "it" coming out both ends. Definitely a handful! No, make that two handfuls! One of the girls had malaria on top of the food poisoning. A few were so dehydrated that they needed IV fluids.

I'm convinced that somebody snuck some sort of snack food into the dorm. Because the symptoms were very classic food poisoning and were very isolated to the one dorm. None of the boys or children from the children's home were affected.

As the day progressed a few girls were carried to the clinic from the local public school. As I saw them coming my first thought was "Oh no, this is not food poisoning, but some sort of an epidemic!" But thankfully the two girls from Chebaiywa had malaria and a different set of symptoms from all of our Brook of Faith girls. This morning we were able to discharge our last malaria and food poisoning patients from yesterdays madness.

I'm hoping for a slower day today and a chance to finish catching up on the admin stuff for the last two weeks. At the moment the sun is shining and the day looks good!