Letters from around the world: dying children an accepted part of life?
Posted by christina
A devastating yet emotional letter from from a doctor who recently moved to Zambia. Her stories of the NICU are saddening, but these letters are testaments to why Embrace exists. They push us to work more determined than ever.
I’ve now been in Zambia just 12 days, but wow, what a week or two. It’s been a real baptism of fire with good, bad, ugly.. and truly tragic parts to it..hospital life here is mad and grim. Really and truly grim. I’ve seen babies and children die here EVERY DAY of diseases that are 100% preventable or treatable. I see children every day who are so malnourished that their skin is falling off them, forming terrible open painful sores, and whose whole bodies are swollen from lack of sufficient good food.
There is a SCBU here (special care baby unit- for premature babies) but it simply consists of wooden boxes with a light bulb for heat and a bowl of water to humidify the air.. and cockroaches crawling through them and these poor scrawny scraps of babies desperately fighting to stay alive against the odds.
I’ve been put on the pediatric ward- which is chaotic- kids are brought in unconscious every day. All day, every day. More kids who are floppy, lethargic or just plain old unconscious. One was even brought in dead. That was a shock..and then to have to tell the parents..
The nurses are their mum’s (or worse their grandmas) who have very different ideas about what their children need. They hate oxygen and nasogastric tubes because they associate them with the sick children who they see die, so they think that the oxygen kills the babies.
Children dying here is an accepted part of life.
Way too accepted.
It kills me.
The suffering is just terrible.