Hospital visit

Monday, November 7, 2011

This morning as I packed up my kids and took a moto out to the Creshe, I realized how long it’s been since I left here. Over two weeks I think. About time!

I left my babies at the Creshe, and went with Heather to Saint Marc. Mondays is her day thatshe often goes to the St Marc Hospital to help. How this woman does everything is beyond me!She will go there and just do whatever she can. More often than not, it’s holding dying babies. The Haitians do not like holding their baby while it’s dying. They think there’ll be a curse of something.

Since she isa legal Creshe, they’ve called herseveral times already when they had abandoned babies there.

I had heard her stories, and wanted to see the situation for myself. I’ve been to this hospital before – lots of times, but not to thissection. They’vedone some building and remodeling.

We walked in, and Heather’s contacts, an American Pediatrician and his wife, told us we could continue bagging a 3 day old baby that had come in about half an hour before. Or we could just hold him, as he was going to die anyway. So we went to the bed in the hallway (thankfully this was a daythey had oxygen. Often they don’t have oxygen for the babies there). Here they had this little (I guess not more than 4 pounds) baby. They had stopped doing CPR.He had had a pulse of 40 when he came in (should have been 120) and then it stopped completely, so they had been bagginghim for like 20 minutes. As weapproached, a visiting pediatrician informed the doctor that he was actually breathing quite well on his own. The doctor’s like, “if this baby survives, it’ll be a miracle”, and the other one responded, “I think a miracle is happening”. He was still holding his own when we left an hour later. This baby had not been given anything but water for 3 days. Mom said she had no milk. And being smallanyway, that was too long!!!

It was kind of emotional being there. I went into the rooms – so many thin and malnourished kids!!!! They do have a malnourished program there, so that’s good. The PROBLEM is the babies under 6 months, that don’t qualify for peanut butter. And they have so many!!!! The parents are responsible to feed them, so if the mom doesn’t breastfeed, they’re in trouble. Lisa (the doctor’s wife) told me that she frequently finds a baby hasn’t had anything for a couple days. And these are often premature babies!!!! Can youimagine????

She said the hospital wouldn’t supply formula for them. Sometimes they have individual people giving, but not usually.

It was heartbreaking!! These little bitty babies, and nothing to feed them???

Another sad situation is theundependability of oxygen there. It causes a lot of deaths. They said over the weekend, 5 babies died.

The other difficult situation is the lack of staffing. I don’t know what the capacity there is (if there is such a thing in Haiti) but Lisa said they’ve sometimes had 1 nurse for 40 patients, though usually there’s 2 or 3. Usually they have one Haitian doctor and one American. They also do a lot of outpatients too. Can you imagine nursing like that? And we’re talking some are babies born at 6 months of gestation!! I saw no normal size baby – all were either too small or preemies, or other problems, like heart, etc. She said basically the only thing nurses can get done there is give meds.

What to do??? Yes, they have people trying to find solutions. But in the meantime……

If anybody would like to help donate money for milk, I would suggest going through Heather, whom they call sometimes if they have an abandoned child and she’ll give them stuff.

Heather’s website should be up this weekend, but you can still go there; I believe it directs you. Just let her know if it’s specificallyfor that.www.GivingHopeHaiti.org

I just gave my baby her fifth bottle of the day. Can’t help but think of the little ones I saw today, who haven’t had any...

Experimenting play with the fork, post dinner

My cutie pie