27 February 2016
In the clinics, we continue to see a mix of needs. Today, headaches were the common theme for me, athough the first guy was not typical. He clearly had some abnormal neurological signs concerning of a stroke, a tumor, or something not right in his brain. Some of it was from childhood but is was hard even with my Quiché interpreter to sort out what was old and what was new. Unfortunately, I did not have much to offer him other than some pain medicine. The nearest place to get some type of brain imaging, if he had the money to pay for it, is two hours away.
Another lady that has come the past three weeks has a very severe facial paralysis (Bell’s Palsy). She has to tape her left eye shut to sleep at night since she is not able to close it on her own. She seems quite discouraged by her condition for good reason. There is no treatment that exists anywhere to help her get better. We have been praying for her at each visit and she seems to be slowly getting more movement back on the left side of her face.
There continues to be a lot diabetic and hypertensive patients that followup regularly. And a bunch of other stuff.
This is Gerardo. When his 18 year-old mother brought him into the Chiminisijuan clinic (almost an hour by truck up in the mountains), I saw that she was carrying a tiny bundle. When she unwrapped him a little bit, I saw that she had a very, very, very tiny baby. With his bundle on, he weighed 3lbs 8oz. I was not comfortable unwrapping him for fear of breaking him. When the nurse who was bolder than I unwrapped him, he weighed in at 2lbs 8oz.
We think he was born on January 20th but mom did not know the exact date, which is actually fairly common here. He was part of the prenatal program so we knew that he was approximate 31 weeks when he was born. Mother, who spoke no Spanish, originally said (through a translator) that she had no milk and he has not be eating anything since he was born about month ago. Later we found out that she had been expressing breastmilk into his tiny mouth as he did not have the strength to latch on and nurse correctly. The person on our team with the most neonatal experience was out of the country and out of touch for the week. So we prayed for wisdom. I messaged my sister, who works as a nurse in the neonatal intensive unit in Michigan and she gave us some guidance.
We gave mother some powder formula, a bottle of clean water, and some syringes to squirt this into Gerardo’s mouth along with some very detailed instructions of how to mix it and how and when to give it (through an interpreter) and hoped that she would understand it all. We asked her to bring him down to Canillá later in the week as we have better formula for him here, but we did not see him today. When we asked about her husband, we found out that he was at the coast working (also very common here during the dry season). It is also common that many men working at the coast spend their money on alcohol and other women, but we hope this is not the case with him. We prayed for Gerardo and his mom and continue to do so. We hope that he will show up on Tuesday and the next clinic in Chiminisijuan.