never a dull moment

Well this week has been QUITE the adventure. It felt like it flew by, but now that I look back on it, so much has happened.

            Let’s start with the hospital, on Tuesdays our house mom (who is also a head nurse) runs an ART clinic for patients with AIDS. She scheduled about 80 patients out of 800 to this specific Tuesday and let us come for the experience. Their day starts with a small church ceremony (Asikuma is an extremely religious part of Ghana so it’s the norm to pray at any possible moment) followed by an educational lesson on how to live with AIDS, how it’s passed along, and any other health and safety tips they find important. After the presentations we took all of their vitals and asked if they had any medical complaints or symptoms. Auntie Maggie would then call them one by one into a counseling session where she would prescribe them medicine for their complaints and make sure they were taking their medication. As scary as AIDS is, and as sick as some of these patients looked, it’s still a very livable disease that doesn’t have to dictate your lifestyle as long as you take your medicine. Therefore, it was so encouraging to see patients looking healthy and yet so discouraging to see the patients that refuse to take their medication. Overall, the ART clinic was an eye opening experience that I’m really glad we got to be a part of.

            In other hospital news, I had a roller coaster of events happen in the children’s ward this week. Until today things were very great and exciting. I got to see a patient who was severely ill when I first arrived in Ghana finally go home and got further training on some nursing techniques (like giving injections in a patients butt). I also witnessed the doctor suck out fluid in a child’s nose and throat who had really bad pneumonia and couldn’t breathe. The low part of my week came today when I witnessed my first patient pass away, a two-year-old little girl. We were doing medication rounds and noticed that she was very dehydrated and in respiratory distress. In the midst of getting her saline solution and an oxygen set up we noticed that her breathing was dangerously slow. The nurses did CPR for as long as they could but it just wasn’t enough and she didn’t make it. Even though I handled it very well, I think they were all worried about me after it happened because they gave me so much work to do I didn’t even have time to think.

            On a happier note, we had a movie night on Wednesday and watched Legally Blonde because that’s one of our sister’s favorite “American” movies. She laughed the ENTIRE time even though she’s seen it before and gladly performed the “bend and snap” for us. She then informed us that she’s seen many American films such as Pretty Woman, Princess Diaries, James Bond and Runaway Bride. Christina and Ashley’s homestay dad drove us home from his house after our movie night and let us sit in the bed of his truck. It was definitely one of the most surreal moments of my life when we were riding through the cornfields, staring at the stars and listening to the local music. We continued our American theme tonight and made them a meal we would eat at home, stir-fry, for dinner. Truthfully we just really wanted vegetables, but they enjoyed the effort and were surprised to like something that we cooked entirely by ourselves.

            Some more interesting facts: health insurance in Ghana is only 15 GHC ($7.50) a year and it covers absolutely everything. They start medical school directly after high school. When people get in fights here they don’t punch each other, they slap…. yes, even the men slap each other.

            Tomorrow evening we are headed back to Cape Coast to be with the rest of the participants. I’ll probably have good internet again so I’ll try to post some more!