Poor girls

Today there’s a 14 year old girl coming in our hospital with a gangrenous left hand and forearm. Actually she fell and got her bone broken above her left elbow 2 months ago. Her family sought treatment from local curer and ended up with a gangrenous fingers. She came to us a month ago and received some treatments. We even advised her to have the fingers amputated but the family refused at that time. Some how they continued the local curer’s treatment who broke her bone one more time trying to reset it and even poured hot water onto her forearm. So today she came in with the gangrene going up to middle of her forearm and the skin of the whole forearm is scalded. We have no choice but to do a below elbow amputation for her to save her life before serious infection set in. What a poor story to share. Seems very stupid story, yet life in some part of the world are really like that and it’s just unbelievable to us from modern cities. Similarly, we have a 17 years old girl having obstructed labour that required a caesarian section for delivery because of her incomplete developed pelvis. She is so young to get pregnant and actually she acted in a very childish way before and during the operation with lots of demands. When the uterus was opened, it smell bad, that mean the amniotic fluid was infected and I just thought the baby won’t make it. The baby was also stuck deep in the pelvis which I only succeeded in taking her out with our midwife pushing her back up to the uterus for me. Luckily, she cried once I took her out of her mother. What a relief! Out in the field, it’s so common to have all these different kinds of difficult deliveries with lots of stillbirth, even maternal death and unbelievable injuries. Life just seems so fragile here!