Robert

I have 6 kids in my front yard asking me to play “kick the can” with them (which I’m sorely tempted to do), Betty is sitting here begging me to take her to Arapi market to get food for the month, I need to get out of my running clothes and get a skirt on and just plain get my day underway but yet I sit here at my computer needing to process but mostly staring into space.

A Ugandan friend of the team, Robert, died late last night or early this morning. He was a good man who did a good job raising his now adult children and currently he was caring for more kids that are not his own. I don’t have all of the facts but the things I do know seem to say that he died of an oral abscess- a tooth ache.

I’m so mad at the incompetent medical system here in Soroti. He was at the best doctor in Soroti and he still died of MODS (though he was never vasopressor dependent so maybe I can’t use this term… I’ve been out of IIU too long!). He had been under that doctor’s care for the whole day and when asked how the patient was doing in the evening he said that because he was unconscious he didn’t know what was wrong with him. When it was suggested by one of my (non-medical) team mates that could it be sepsis? the doctor began to ponder that. But Robert had un-measureable blood pressures since early yesterday morning and around 6 pm after having been on IV (glucose?!) drip all day he finally had a pressure around 70/40 but was unresponsive, vomiting brown fluids and not breathing well. Not surprisingly he died a few hours after that.  Talk about an un-necessary death.  I had offered a few weeks before to pull the rotten tooth for him but there are dentists in Soroti and Robert has a paying job and let’s face it I’m not terribly excited to remove teeth so I figured he would be OK. He delayed in going to see the dentist and by then needed to be on abx for a while before they would pull it. Then, apparently he was still undertreated and the abscess remained. Then yesterday morning on his way home from work he passed out on his bike and had been sliding down hill since.

I feel bad that I didn’t get involved- how preventable! But so many deaths here are. Kids in the states don’t die of diarrhea and they do here. Women don’t bleed to death after delivery there for lack of pitotocin and an educated midwife. I could go on and on but I’m only getting more discouraged.

Time to go play “kick the can”….