This week in medical news…
Well we’ve had our first round of sickness that have required a trip to the clinic! Now that I’ve enticed you to read on, let me first begin by saying last week started with an injury for Lucy. After climbing a metal pole outside with bare feet (a MAJOR no-no in our house) she decided to slide down which resulting in shearing the skin off the top of her foot. I was unaware of the injury (it happened during my daily 2 hour Portuguese lesson and the babysitter was in charge) and therefore did not bandage it or notice it until the next day at the beach. (Please don’t call county services on me; she’s usually dramatic enough to make me notice things like this!) When she did finally show me (the babysitter put Band-Aids over it) I thought it seemed rather oozy and gunky, but I figured the salt water would help heal it. Oops, I thought wrong! When we returned to Maputo I showed her foot to our friends (one is a doctor, the other a nurse practitioner) and they both informed me I needed to cover her wound with a Band-Aid 24 hours a day and apply Neosporin once a day. My thinking that the salt water would help would have been accurate had she not removed an ENTIRE layer of skin from her foot. You see normally a “skinned” foot/knee/elbow/etc. grows new skin from below the surface. However in Lucy’s case she had removed several layers and her new skin had to grow from the outside in. So every time it got wet or buried in the sand the new skin growth was ripped off and the process had to start all over again! Happy to report that her foot is looking good and healing nicely now that we have kept it dry and covered for a week!
Mia had a memorable Friday night and Saturday. We had been at our mother’s prayer/children’s playgroup last Thursday and one of the little girls had just had a birthday the day before. She has wheat allergies and had eaten birthday cake and spent the night throwing up - obviously a result of her food allergy. Again a wrong assumption on my part! Friday night Mia (and four of her friends from the group) began vomiting and proceeded to wake up and be sick every hour or so for the rest of the night. I prayed A LOT in those hours of waking that the rest of our family would be spared. God has been very gracious and no one else in our house has gotten sick! Although I can’t say the same about the other families – 6 dads and 4 moms and 3 siblings have gotten the bug too!
As for Kaleb, he was the one who finally forced us into the clinic. He began complaining last Monday that his ear hurt. Again I pushed and “gently tugged” at his ear all the while asking, “Does this hurt?” He didn’t seem to have the “usual” areas of tenderness associated with an ear infection and he had no fever or loss of appetite. I again consulted with my “medical friends” (thank you Lord for friends in the medical profession!) and they suggested it might be swimmer’s ear (my kids are in some sort of water every day) or perhaps a little pimple, which needed to erupt. They both assured me that if it was a more serious infection he would be crying and in severe pain. So with that information I gave him a little Tylenol Friday night to help him cope with the irritation and sleep. Unfortunately early Saturday morning he woke up early crying and insisting he had never been in this much pain IN HIS LIFE! So Steve got up, got dressed and put him in the car to take him to Sommershield Clinic. Following is Steve’s assessment of the process (including a trip to the pharmacy for medication).
It was early morning when we arrived at Sommershield Clinic. It is about a 5-minute drive from our house – very convenient! There were hardly any other patients there and the receptionist at the desk was nice – she even spoke some English. The waiting room was clean, but a little dingy – let’s just say it wasn’t Park Nicollet. We waited for about 15 minutes before being called back to an exam room, which was small and dark. A doctor arrived (also an English speaker) and looked at K’s ear. He then told me that they had an ear specialist who could see Kaleb! He left the room to call him and about 5 minutes later a nice, baseball loving, Maputo living, Cuban doctor came in. The doctor informed us that Kaleb’s ear canal was closing due to infection and it was creating a tremendous amount of pressure. He also had an overload of earwax (thanks to an inherited predisposition to high levels of earwax) that was adding to the pressure. He diagnosed Kaleb with a severe ear infection and swimmer’s ear and told me if the pain didn’t improve in a few days on meds he wanted Kaleb to come back and have a tube put in to drain the fluid. We were grateful to have some answers and a remedy! After leaving the clinic with several prescriptions, driving to 3 different Farmacia’s and two stops at different ATM’s for money, Kaleb and I arrived home with enough medicine to heal a platoon in the Mozambique military. (Yes we actually have one!) Drops, pills, and two different liquids. Poor kid his body probably made him better just so he would stop the meds.
So some things are the same here as everywhere. Kids get sick and you have to change sheets filled with throw up at 3:00 am only to wake up an hour later to a crying 8 year old! Thanks for all of the prayers that have been said on our behalf, please continue to pray for our health during this high malaria season. Thanks for all you do to support and encourage us! Here’s to healthy living!
Mia had a memorable Friday night and Saturday. We had been at our mother’s prayer/children’s playgroup last Thursday and one of the little girls had just had a birthday the day before. She has wheat allergies and had eaten birthday cake and spent the night throwing up - obviously a result of her food allergy. Again a wrong assumption on my part! Friday night Mia (and four of her friends from the group) began vomiting and proceeded to wake up and be sick every hour or so for the rest of the night. I prayed A LOT in those hours of waking that the rest of our family would be spared. God has been very gracious and no one else in our house has gotten sick! Although I can’t say the same about the other families – 6 dads and 4 moms and 3 siblings have gotten the bug too!
As for Kaleb, he was the one who finally forced us into the clinic. He began complaining last Monday that his ear hurt. Again I pushed and “gently tugged” at his ear all the while asking, “Does this hurt?” He didn’t seem to have the “usual” areas of tenderness associated with an ear infection and he had no fever or loss of appetite. I again consulted with my “medical friends” (thank you Lord for friends in the medical profession!) and they suggested it might be swimmer’s ear (my kids are in some sort of water every day) or perhaps a little pimple, which needed to erupt. They both assured me that if it was a more serious infection he would be crying and in severe pain. So with that information I gave him a little Tylenol Friday night to help him cope with the irritation and sleep. Unfortunately early Saturday morning he woke up early crying and insisting he had never been in this much pain IN HIS LIFE! So Steve got up, got dressed and put him in the car to take him to Sommershield Clinic. Following is Steve’s assessment of the process (including a trip to the pharmacy for medication).
It was early morning when we arrived at Sommershield Clinic. It is about a 5-minute drive from our house – very convenient! There were hardly any other patients there and the receptionist at the desk was nice – she even spoke some English. The waiting room was clean, but a little dingy – let’s just say it wasn’t Park Nicollet. We waited for about 15 minutes before being called back to an exam room, which was small and dark. A doctor arrived (also an English speaker) and looked at K’s ear. He then told me that they had an ear specialist who could see Kaleb! He left the room to call him and about 5 minutes later a nice, baseball loving, Maputo living, Cuban doctor came in. The doctor informed us that Kaleb’s ear canal was closing due to infection and it was creating a tremendous amount of pressure. He also had an overload of earwax (thanks to an inherited predisposition to high levels of earwax) that was adding to the pressure. He diagnosed Kaleb with a severe ear infection and swimmer’s ear and told me if the pain didn’t improve in a few days on meds he wanted Kaleb to come back and have a tube put in to drain the fluid. We were grateful to have some answers and a remedy! After leaving the clinic with several prescriptions, driving to 3 different Farmacia’s and two stops at different ATM’s for money, Kaleb and I arrived home with enough medicine to heal a platoon in the Mozambique military. (Yes we actually have one!) Drops, pills, and two different liquids. Poor kid his body probably made him better just so he would stop the meds.
So some things are the same here as everywhere. Kids get sick and you have to change sheets filled with throw up at 3:00 am only to wake up an hour later to a crying 8 year old! Thanks for all of the prayers that have been said on our behalf, please continue to pray for our health during this high malaria season. Thanks for all you do to support and encourage us! Here’s to healthy living!
posted by Sniders in Africa at 3/02/2006 09:51:00 PM
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