Luna

Don't know why I lost the entire blog yesterday....

At any rate, my first day on the infant ward I met an American nurse named Angela. She is here with several other American nurses working with the ministry of health and the nursing school. She was on the ward visiting baby Luna.

Luna was born at home, like most children in Eritrea. Unlike most chlidren in Eritrea she was born with a cleft lip and cleft palate. Therefore, soon after her birth Luna's mother brought her to the hospital.

It is unclear the details of what happened next. What is known is that the doctors thought that Luna's mother was anemic and required a blood transfusion. Sometime after the transfusion started Luna's mother died. Was it because she received a transfusion with the wrong blood type? Was it because she went into fulminant heart failure? Was it because she had an anaphylactic reaction to the transfusion? None of this is known. But it is not surprising.

In the United States when a patient receives a blood transfusion all of the information is double- and triple-checked by nurses before being administered - is it the right patient? is the blood product the right blood type? etc. When I was in South Africa (where the health care system was 100 times more sofisticated than here) there was no double checking to ensure that the patient received the proper blood product. I simply went to the blood bank and picked up a brown paper bag, brought it back to the ward where a nurse hooked it up to the patient.

Moreover, in the United States when a patient receives a transfusion vital signs are recorded every 15 minutes. When I asked for vital signs to be recorded every 30 minutes on a patient receiving a transfusion not a single number was recorded.

This is why it is not surprising that Luna's mother died. And her father is schizophrenic. So Luna's care (plus that of her siblings) has been left to her 2 aunts, who each have 4 children of their own.

When Angela went to their home to check on baby Luna she found her lying in a crib, covered by flies, emaciated, dehydrated and forgotten. She was down an amazing 25% from birth weight and was not expected to live. Luna has now been in the hospital for more than 2 weeks and she is back up to birth weight. Her aunts, through the dedication of these American nurses, have been convinced of Luna's worth and her ability to survive. She will likely be discharged tomorrow. It's nice that some stories have happy endings, isn't it?