Busy Sunday and messy Monday

When you are working 24/7, one always tries to get a bit of rest on Saturday afternoon and Sunday but things are not always happening in your way. On Saturday afternoon I started with a pregnant lady that required caesarian section, because of two previously done caesarian section, chance of rupture uterus is very high if we let her go on normal delivery. Things went smooth for the lady and the baby, but it was not so for another lady who was in obstructed labour and gave to a stillbirth, but even worse her vaginal wall was completely torn right into the rectum. If not repaired, it will become a curse for her with a fistula linking the rectum & vagina, I try my best to repair the tear and hope everything will be fine again to her. After a lazy and relaxing Sunday morning, the operation theater team needed to rush back to the hospital for a lady with two previous caesarian sections in labour, then it was followed by another baby in breech presentation with obstructed labour. Luckily, everything is fine for the 2 mothers and babies. Our project in Aweil was not used to be so busy and my teammates joke on me that I’m the king of caesarian section, just in 3 days arrival. Things seems not to stop for me because after midnight, we need to go back to the hospital again for a lady with severe bleeding while in labour, We rushed to save the mother but sadly the baby didn’t make it. The placenta was down in the cervical opening and the bleeding was getting worse on each labour contraction. The baby probably didn’t have enough blood supply from the bleeding placenta, what a nightmare! Working in remote and primitive setting is always challenging. We didn’t have too much operation on Monday but things can get messy in another way. Nearly all our national staff were absent from the operation theater. One is already on leave, then another one just have malaria and really need rest and treatment. Our chief operation theater technician got some family problems that need to go back home as soon as possible and he may not be able to come back in the near future, so we need some adjustments in the coming days to solve our human resource issue. We have an unfortunate boy that have infection in his left thigh bone so much, so my previous colleague needed to take out the broken head of his left thigh bone, but things didn’t improve for him, so now he still have a large open wound in his thigh with three discharging sinuses (one of which was laid open by me for better discharge drainage). The only good news is our X-Ray technician is back and I may have a chance to see what I can do for any dead bone left inside that’s causing the trouble. I do hope everything will turn in his way because it’s heart breaking to see his sad eyes full of resentment to life! A good news is that the boy with penetrating eye injury seems to response to antibiotic I gave to him since Saturday, I really hope he can recover well without his eyeball taken out. It’s sometimes difficult for us, city people, to imagine the life can be that hard in another part of the same planet!