Will try not to write too much cos i know it's a lot to read. On Wednesday we went to the public hospital in Puerto Plata... It is indescribable; and not in a good way. If you are admitted to the hospital you have to bring your own sheets, own food, own medicine, and bring someone with you to look after you. the relatives/friends sleep in the same bed as the patient and if it's really busy, sometimes you have more than one patient in each bed. Every patient has an IV - why, no-one knows... There is no sanitation at all and i saw no loos or bedpans. Oh and there's no privacy for patients. There are relatively few drs and nurses and they don't really know what they're doing anyway. If you have no money, you don't get treated, you just lie there... there is no hope...
We went round the wards, sung to people in spanish (pray tell me where in the UK you can walk into a hospital ward, sing a praise song and have everyone join in?!?!) and then some of the people sung solos back to us. We then visited with the patients. we gave all the kids soft toys and the adults hygiene packs (toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, flannel). We sat with the patients and either played with them (the kids) or just held their hands. we couldn't talk to them really due to the language barrier. my sum total of spanish is to ask a person's name! I managed to find out how the carers were related to the patients and which part of their body hurt and with one guy i discovered Jesus is his friend - serious note to self, learn spanish before doing this again! It was odd to sit and hold the hand of a man you've never met but hey, comfort comes in all forms!
We also saw the premature baby ward. Oh my word, it's awful. there are no machines in there, no ventilators, no nothing. just tiny little beds where they lie. i don't understand why they go in there as there seems to be no care for them... in the toddlers ward we met a missionary who had brought in a one year old girl with such severe dehydration that her skin looks like that of an old person. it was all stretchy. She'd come over from haiti with her mum and they'd been travelling in the hot sun and only just arrived. Horrendous...
couple of stories just to help you guys understand what we saw...
1) a kid who had fallen into a fire just over 2 MONTHS ago. for 2 months it wasn't treated even though she was in the hospital. it had just been left to scab over and get infected. Finally the missionaries found her and got her cleaned up and they've been in every day to change the gauze... she's now much better...
2) a lady had been in the hospital for 20 days with 2 broken arms (she'd been in a moped accident i think) which had been completely untreated because she needed 150gbp for an operation... Being Haitian she had no way to raise the money and so would have just lay there until they healed in a manner that would have meant she couldn't use her arms... We all pooled together and easily raised the money and i think she had an operation today.
3) there was a diabetic there who needed a blood transfusion. Because of septicemia (i think) he'd had bits of his legs amputated multiple times. He couldn't cope with the sugar things they were giving him because he was so malnourished... some of our guys gave blood yesterday and today and thus by reallocating some blood they were able to give him some blood...
4) finally, today i found out about a patient who had liquid around his heart. the public hospital couldn't do anything for him so they sent him home on a public bus to die - they didn't think he'd last the weekend. 2 of our team took him to the private hospital today to try and get it drained. he wouldn't have had much of a chance in the UK. who knows what will happen...
makes our MRSA infected hospitals look amazing, eh?
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