Well, it’s hard to believe we’ve been here for five months already. Miles’ and Jasper’s birthdays came and went, tax season is almost over (thank goodness for me), and I will be getting my dive certification soon. I’m supposed to start sometime after this Wednesday. Thankfully, most of our skin troubles seem to be clearing up. After countless different rashes, Jasper is looking more or less normal again. After trying a bunch of different remedies, it seems like in the end, his skin did the best when we stopped doing anything altogether. For the last week, we’ve just been washing him with soap every morning in the shower and have gotten the best results yet. We’ve stopped using bug spray on him, and to our surprise, he is hardly getting bit, even down at the Waqa’s where they don’t have screens on the windows. When I picked him up from there the other day, he did not have a single bite after running around all day. Yesterday after running around outside up by our house (where there are a TON of mosquitoes), he had only one bite. I am amazed and very glad—now we can stop using DEET (on Jasper anyway, I still get tons of bites).
Our number of encounters with the medical establishment of Fiji is growing. And boy are they interesting. Miles went to see Dr. Joeli, the only private doctor in town, last week. His clinic or “surgery” is in town, and the only other option for medical care is the hospital. Miles had a cold that he thought might be developing into an upper respiratory infection and possibly an ear infection. The doctor didn’t find any signs of infection (in the ears anyway, he didn’t really check anywhere else), so Miles came away with some Sudafed (hey, at least we know where to get it). The medications dispensed at the doctor’s office are frequently not in their original packaging, and are instead put in plastic baggies with a hand-written slip of paper with the name of the medication on it. Just a few weeks ago, John got such a bag with an antibiotic in it, some brown and black pills with the name scrawled on a slip of paper, plus another slip of paper with “2 pills, 3x/day” written on it. The best part was when we googled the name of the antibiotic and found two close matches, but no exact match for that name. But hey, it’s that or go to the hospital… plus the bill for Miles visit and a bunch of Sudafed was about $9 US.
This weekend, we chose the hospital. Sunday morning, Jasper was walking around with a cup of milk, when he tripped and fell. The glass broke, giving him several cuts on the arm and hand. One of the cuts on his arm was quite deep and Miles determined that it would need stitches. Since it was Sunday morning, our only choice was the hospital. I did not go, since I was sick and had to drag myself out of bed and try not to throw up while cleaning up the blood and glass, but Miles gave a report when they returned. Apparently, Miles wandered around the empty hospital for a while before encountering a nurse. When he told her his son was injured and asked her where the intake area was, she simply took them over to a nurse’s station, cleaned the wound, gave him an injection of a local anesthetic, and then attempted to stitch the cut. Apparently Jasper was just fine with the injection and sat there and stared as she gave it. But when she was doing the first stitch, he just went nuts crying and trying to get away. So he only got one stitch, instead of what probably should have been three. But it’s healing well, it’s not infected (miracle of miracles here in the tropics), and when Miles and the nurse determined there would be no further stitches, they just got up and went home. No paperwork, no wait, no money exchanged.
Now, the hospital does have an outpatient clinic, an “emergency room” of sorts, which I have seen. Miles just didn’t know where it was, and frankly, I’m not sure if it’s staffed on the weekends anyway. When I went there, it was with my friend, the Dutch nurse, and we gave ourselves a tour. The outpatient treatment area consisted of a long bench in the hallway, which people crammed together on while waiting to be seen, and a room behind the bench, where people were treated all in the same room. There was a table, where two doctors sat, each talking to a different patient (no confidentiality here), and then a curtain separating them from the area where the nurses gave care. When I was there, I made friends with one of the nurses on duty, and she chatted to me while we were about three feet away from a man getting an IV for dehydration. We were sitting on a hospital bed which I noticed was heavily stained with blood when I got up. No one was wearing gloves.
On the rest of our “tour” I saw the children’s ward, the men’s ward, the women’s ward and the OB room. The wards consisted of eight beds each, all in one room, four on one side of the hall, four on the other. I didn’t see any nurses around, except for the two from the outpatient clinic who came with us. The OB room was just that, one small dingy room with an ancient hospital bed, with an ancient fetal monitor and a broken incubator. In each of the wards there was a hand-written sign about making the budget stretch by washing all supplies and using them again. Everything except syringes was to be used again and again. Now I know there is a lot of waste in the way we do things, and many of the things used in our hospitals probably should be multi-use, but it came as quite a shock to me to see just how little there was by way of resources. Anna (the Dutch nurse) told me that she had been to the hospital the week before and had talked with a different hospital nurse and had asked her how they deal with crisis, with situations like not being able to revive a newborn, etc. She said the nurse seemed offended and answered with a snide tone, “we manage.” She probably thought this western, white nurse was looking down at the way they did things. But the truth is, she (and I) just wanted to know.