A little nursing for Christmas!

On Christmas eve I was called by a woman who I often see at the hospital. She is blind, in her mid 60's and her ministry is to do what she can to help families and people in the hospital. She is really a neat lady. Anyway, she called me Christmas eve, told me she had a woman who was really bad and could I please come help? I didn’t really understand her, they were already at the hospital but I trust this lady and if she was asking me to come, I would. I was up to my elbows cooking for Christmas but I turned the stove off, tossed my medical bag in the car and headed to Soroti hospital. I came upon a huge crowd outside. I parked the car a little ways away and walked in, looking for my friend. She was near the back sitting on the ground with a woman lying next to her. A white person is like immediate entertainment so within seconds it seemed 400 people were watching us.  I asked what was going on and all I got was that the nurses were leaving for Christmas so the patients were being kicked out of the hospital and this lady needed help getting somewhere to spend the night. What!?  There were no doctors to be seen anywhere, only patients and their families milling around outside. I was getting more and more attention by the second so I decided we had to get out of there and figure out what to do later. In the process of getting these two ladies to my car it became evident that the patient was in labor. Awesome.  My house is only a few minutes from the hospital so we headed there. I unloaded my blind friend and the patient, who’s name I learned was Helen, sat in the shade in my yard. I got the rest of the story. She was from a village 25 minute’s drive away, 8 months pregnant. She had been vomiting her whole pregnancy but worse in the last month. She was really skinny except for her protruding belly.  She started having abd pain (very different from her first 5 pregnancies/labors) and went to the hospital. She says they did nothing for her. I did some hydration there in the shade of my front yard and meds for nausea. Within a short time she was eating rice and saying the pain was decreasing but still coming in waves. Good FHTs and no bleeding or discharge.  We decided instead of brining her back to the village she could go to my blind friend’s house and they could call me if anything changed. I encouraged them to keep on with the bland foods and I supplied them with lots of ORS (oral rehydration solution) and took them to her house. I heard a little bit ago today that the contractions went away and she went back to her other kids in the village but this system drives me nuts. How many people died or suffered un-necessarily because nurses were refusing to work on Christmas?! Yikes!

(Thanks to all my nursing friends who had to leave their families to work the holiday!)