Machetes With Minds Of Their Own.

The end of the week has come.

It's bittersweet, but the team from PA and I have had some good times this week.

I told you about some of our interesting cases in the previous posts, but let me tell you about a few more of them.

People use machetes for many things. It is not unusual to walk along the street and see men and women carrrying unsheathed machetes around. It's not even unusual to get on a bus and have a machete next to you. 

Machetes however, sometimes have a mind of their own. 

Last week we saw two machete wounds. Both of them were female. One of them was a little girl. 

The first one we saw was the girl. She had cut open the inside ankle, right over the bone. Around here, it is common to stuff wounds with limestone to both stop the bleeding and to prevent infection. In this case though, it probably wasn't a good idea. She needed stitches, badly. Elvin can stitch people up no problem. The problem was that with all the limestone in there, even with careful cleaning, we don't know if we got it all out. If even a little bit of a foreign object is still inside a wound, there is a much higher likelihood of infection. 

Some of the ladies of the PA team had worked really hard to re-organize our storage room. Inside we discovered one set of butterfly bandages, which we snapped up. After a thorough cleaning, and large amount of polysporin, we got her sort of closed up, with room for oozing. 

We put her on antibiotics, told her to come back at the end of the week for a recheck, and sent her home. She is in the school system, so it is fairly easy to check up on her. 

She didn't end up coming in for a check up though. Elvin went to her school to take her some extra dressing supplies, and found out that she wasn't taking her antibiotic. She also was walking a lot, which was pulling the butterfly bandages off. Poor kid, she most likely has to walk everywhere, and who knows why she wasn't taking her medication. Thankfully Elvin was able to follow up with her.

Our second machete wound was severely infected. The poor woman did not have access to clean dressings, and had let it fester for many days. Her leg was swollen, red, hot, and the wound was oozing yucky goo. 

A thorough cleaning later, some hefty antibiotics, and she was sent home too, with instructions to return every day for a check to make sure the antibiotics were working. 

She didn't come back until this week. She was almost done with all the antibiotics when I saw her for her re-check, The wound looked slightly better, but was definitely still infected. Thankfully, the NP from the team that saw her is a friend of mine, and I could Facebook message him for advice. In our newly re-organized and clean storage room I found a bunch of wound dressing equipment, and wanted to give her the best that we had. 

I was going to put up a picture of the healing wound, but it is not for the faint of heart. Sorry guys.

Anyway, we decided that for now, she just needed to finish the antibiotics, keep it covered and clean, and let her body heal. We had enough dressing supplies that I could send her with a large amount. She should be coming in on Tuesday next week for me to see it again.

Those were some of our most exciting stories from the week. I really like being here for the longer-term, because it is so fun to follow up with our patients, and make sure they are keeping up with their medication. God also does miracles. What does not seem like a medication or intervention that would work, God turns into something amazing. I am so blessed by that. 

God really used the team last week. God always works here. He always works everywhere.