The Things Medicine Can't Provide

I haven’t made many posts about the pediatric ward and the patients I’ve taken care of. I think the reason is that the first week we arrived in Mbingo, we experienced what every doctor dreads – we had three children die. The first died of Burkitts lymphoma after starting chemotherapy. Another was brought in to the ward already deceased from complications of HIV. The third child died from septic shock despite our best efforts to save her. I can still hear the mother’s wails and the silence of the rest of the peds wards; each mother secretly relieved it was not their own child but fearful they could be next. It was a baptism by fire to practicing medicine in Africa. I pushed my feelings deep inside, as I so often have to do when taking care of sick children, in order to keep working.

Today we visited the peds ward not just as doctors, but as people that cared about the patients and their families. We sat and visited with the mothers. We brought mobiles that the Schlaudecker children made and hung them in the windows. We handed out balloons and crayons with coloring pages to all of the children. One by one, smiles crept across faces, mothers laughed and opened up to us. I learned more about the families I was caring for in that afternoon than I had in all the mornings rounding. And it was therapeutic!

The boy in bed 1 is an adorable 6 year old who has had weight loss and fever for the last 8 months. His mother has been sick with worry watching her son waste away and took him from doctor to doctor until coming to Mbingo. We believe he has TB, though the tests we have are negative, and he started treatment one week ago. He looks fatigued and malnourished and is too quiet and sad appearing for a 6 year old child. As I visited with his mother, the boy sat up in bed and started coloring, which was more than I’d seen him do the whole week he has been admitted. His mother said she was so happy to see him play again.

Another child is an adorable 4 year old recently diagnosed with HIV and possibly TB and is very ill. He is too weak to sit up for long, but when we gave him his balloon he smiled and laughed and batted it back and forth between his mother, both looking like they had forgotten how sick he was for a minute. His mother said she hopes that getting to play will help him build some of his strength back.

Then there’s a 15 year old girl who came in with paralysis of an unknown cause. We suspect that she has conversion disorder (manifesting stress as the symptom of paralysis) triggered by her father getting put into prison. She sat up in bed and smiled for the first time, eagerly waiting for us to come to her.

I’ve seen how even with the best medicines and care, children can be damaged or die, in Africa and America. But the statistics and hope here are even grimmer. I’m not able to make my patient’s TB meds work faster or cure their HIV, no matter how much I want to. But today, I was able to help them play and be kids, which I believe helps them to heal. I was able to look the mothers of the children I cannot cure in the eye and make a connection; to show them that there are people in the world that care deeply for their families. I was able to give them something that medicine alone is unable to give.