I remember John and Barbara telling us stories about how Fijians would wear parkas and socks with their flip-flops during the winter here, but somehow, I couldn’t quite believe that it really got cold. I mean, this is the tropics, right? They wear jeans during the summer, too—they’re just used to it. Well, after being cold and wearing my only long pants and my only pair of socks for three days in a row, I realized that it was solstice. Winter solstice. And it’s COLD.
I’m not sure how, but Miles seems to be much better prepared than me (he’s got jeans and plenty of socks), and he keeps laughing at me for saying that it’s cold. He reminds me that it’s not any colder than Oregon in September, and that I am just used to it. As excited as I am to be coming home, I try not to think about the cold. I’m not sure how I’m going to survive it. All I can say is that it’s good I’m coming in August, when it will be nice and warm, so I will have time to ease gradually into the cool fall weather.
Jasper is doing even more awesome than usual. We went through a rough patch of two year old behavior, but either we’re used to it now, or we’re reached a good equilibrium. I can’t help but think that our decision to keep him home a lot more (away from the kids who shoot pretend machine guns and hit each other for fun) has something to do with his more pleasant behavior. He’s really into reading books and spends a significant portion of the day either reading to himself or asking us to read to him, and has some really cute two year old obsessions—planes, busses, boats, fish (and to some extent animals in general), and the moon. Now that he has been on a plane trip (that he can remember), he zooms around the house making plane noises and flying his “plane” (his hand) every time he hears a plane land or take off from the airport (about 10 times per day). When we are in town, he excitedly points out every bus that goes by (way too many to count), and sits in rapt wonder when I take him on the bus (which I’ve done twice now for fun). When we’re in town, he points out all the boats in the harbor, and we’ve inflated the micro-dinghy in the living room, which he plays in all the time. In the book “Sand Cake”, he excitedly points out the boats on every page, as he does with the moon in “Goodnight Moon” and “Where the Wild Things Are”. And every night we look for the moon outside (stars get some excitement, but the main attraction is definitely the moon). When I take him to the market, I always let him pick out a fish to take home, and he proudly carries it (in a plastic bag) and when people stop to talk to my little kaivalagi boy (which happens about every 15 seconds), he holds up his bag and excitedly says “ika, ika” (Fijian for fish). Oh how they love him. His favorite movie (well, pretty much the only one he has seen here, besides some recorded rugby) is “Blue Planet”, an hour-long documentary (BBC I think) about the Earth’s oceans, which strongly features two of his favorite things, fish and the moon (there are a lot of time lapse moon/tide shots). And his skin is finally doing better. We seem to have the mosquito reaction under control with the children’s Claritin, as well as keeping him inside more and using coconut oil on him (great mosquito repellent) to prevent the bites in the first place. Unfortunately, the scars he has from scratching will probably last for a while.
I am still going to the hospital for clinic every week and loving it. Hopefully I will be able to attend some deliveries before I leave too. One of the nurses wrote my cell number on the OB ward’s blackboard, but the next time I went in it had been erased. So I wrote it again, only to see it had been erased again by two days later. I’m not sure why it’s getting erased, but now one of the nurses has my number in her cell phone, and another nurse who works on the weekend wrote my number on a slip of paper by the phone, so hopefully between the two of them, someone will call me at some point. I’ll have to check to see if the paper is still there after clinic tomorrow. I really want them to call me! We’ll see if it actually happens though. One of the Peace Corps volunteers who used to work at the hospital told me that she would try to get people to call her or even just talk to her to let her know about trainings, etc, but that in the eight months she was there, not one person called her. After eight months, she changed her position to working in the schools, since she said she basically didn’t do anything at the hospital, and that as far as she could tell, most of the people working there try their best to do nothing as well. Sigh. I will keep working on them anyway. If I can get one single phone call, I will consider it a huge success.
Showing posts with label hospital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hospital. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Doctors, Hospitals, Health Concerns, oh my!
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.
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.
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