Letter from Haiti #2

30 September 2017

“Well, this IS Haiti.”

Surprises are generally good, but not when you are trying to see sick folk. There is something about saying, “Gee, I didn’t think of THAT” or “I didn’t think THAT would happen” that just doesn’t sit well with anyone. I was walking into the small office here at the Haiti Health Ministries Clinic and a young woman was sitting and talking with the missionary Sandra who runs the clinic. The woman had a bandage over her right eyebrow which is not a big deal. Abscesses are common here and I have opened and drained a few this week.

This young woman had had a recurrent sore there so the doc ordered a CT scan of her sinuses. Instead, the x-ray doc got it wrong, did the whole brain scan and lo, there was this big, round, “thing” behind that right eye, lodged squarely in her brain. Whatever it is had drilled a hole through the thin part of her skull and into her eyebrow. We don’t know what it is yet, but this is not simple, it changes her life and it IS a surprise. We DON’T like surprises. Why do things like this happen? Well the short answer is that this is Haiti. It is a cross roads of bad nutrition, bad sanitation, poverty, bad things in the environment, bad politics and just bad luck. After that I am sure there is some science involved.

At the end of my work day, around 4 PM or so, I sometimes get a missionary or two from the states who talk normal. Ha ha. This allows my translator to go home, but I have to work fairly fast because the lab, the pharmacy and lady who runs the small x-ray machine are all in the process of going home too. Clasped in the steely grip of a thin, resolute, old, white woman was this chubby, dark, 15 month old with a runny nose. The woman was the director of one of the orphanages. I got the feeling this was one of “her” kids. Got it? No she wasn’t abrasive or anything like that. From the neck up she was nice to talk to. From the neck down well not so much. She said she saw he wasn’t breathing good. Diagnosis was pneumonia. An x-ray, a shot of antibiotics, some antibiotics to take back to his “home,” something to help with his breathing and we could wrap it up.

It is tempting to want to describe a little boy like this as “cute.” That just wasn’t the case here, not in the classic, cover-of-Healthy-Child-Magazine sense of the term. He was just small and helpless, goopy nose, trying to breath, looking at me and trying to figure out what in the world was going on? Good luck with that question. I wonder about it myself. I couldn’t help but wonder how much longer the lioness guarding him would be there though. I hope there are more like her coming down the pike, soon, like real soon.

People swell up for odd reasons. There are basically 3 ways for this. The heart doesn’t beat well and the blood backs up in the legs. The blood slowly chugging along back to the heart leaks plasma into the tissue around it. Another reason is “osmosis” or the movement of water across a membrane into an area where there is more salt. If the blood is way too thin from anemia or from starving you see the fluid pass through the veins to the surrounding tissue. In starving kids it bloats there bellies. Finally some diseases inflame the veins making them leak. This one woman I saw had about half of her blood cells missing from hookworms, a worm that enters through the feet. The swelling had marched up her legs and into her stomach for several months, making her tired and making it hard for her to walk. Worms are easy to treat as is the anemia, but it must have been a lot of worms. That is why I wear my sandals, by the way.

This is Haiti after all.