Another week.....
It’s really dry season. The temperature is only 24 degrees, but it feels much hotter in the sun which is really scorching. Thank goodness we are under cloud cover for the part of the year when the sun would be straight overhead (we are 5 degrees north of the equator here). The humidity is down to just over 70% today, even inside my house where the floor is still wet when I lift the grass mats – from the cement still trying to dry after construction. I guess I should take the gauge outside and see how humid – or not – it is there. There is a wind today – typical of dry season – and a heavy haze blocks the view down the valley. It will get much worse of course, but this must be the start of the dust. Many people are sick with colds and coughs, and malaria is hitting many people too – it’s the mosquito season with standing water now that the daily downpours have ended. The clothes dried on the line yesterday though, and one can go walking without fear of a drenching, or being caught on the wrong side of a flooded stream.
This wasn’t a great week at Mbingo. A medical residency began here in July, with two local doctors as residents. One was expecting her first child, and since she is well known, there was considerable anticipation. Monday she delivered a stillborn baby – baby fine during labour but she delivered quickly and the cord was tightly around the neck several times. Care here is not quite like the west but it’s pretty good, with a fetal monitor and all. So it was devastating for not only Francine and her husband, but for everyone here, especially the midwives, and for the American GP who was caring for her, as well as being her teacher in the residency program. Over the weekend another staff wife, also well known, delivered a baby at 25 weeks and of course without any neonatal unit, that baby also died. On Tuesday, a very sick 30-year-old woman was brought to theatre with a perforated bowel from typhoid fever. She had delivered a baby 4 weeks before, then was unwell and treated with medication but perhaps not the right thing for typhoid. She must have delayed several days after the perforation before coming to hospital. My students were discussing the reasons for delay – often money is the issue, and in her case, there would have been costs for a new baby, and because she was sick, the family had to buy “artificial milk” – and perhaps there was just not enough money for transport and for a hospital fee. Or maybe the family went first to the traditional healer. In any case, she died shortly after the surgery – and it was probably amazing that anaesthesia got her through it alive. We have a visiting anaesthetist from US who was quite shocked at the death like this of someone so young – unfortunately, we see it not infrequently, always for the same reasons.
On the plus side, my friend Comfort had a number of us expats over for supper one night to share her thanksgiving for being alive one year after a very serious illness that almost killed her. She has terrible allergies to just about every known drug, and must have an autoimmune disorder. But she is quite a marvelous woman and keeps going. It was a happy get-together – and very typically Cameroonian, to celebrate with your friends anything worth celebrating.
Our youngest nurse anaesthetist has just become engaged too, and that is a very happy event. The whole process of marriage here is complex and I still don’t really understand it all. The traditional part of his wedding will not be an “event” open to friends, but simply delivery of the bride price to her family – and the public wedding will be the church one, sometime early in the New Year. Our OR nurse who heads the ortho team is being married next Saturday here in Mbingo – this will be my 2nd Cameroon wedding and I’m excited about it. His traditional marriage was while I was home unfortunately – that would have been interesting to attend. His church wedding will be quite western, if the wedding I attended last year is anything to go by.
The garden is growing quickly, with small flowers on the Sweet 100 tomatoes, and beans ready to flower. Gideon mulched it all yesterday with grass, since the sun dries the soil in just hours. So far nobody has picked me up the requested hose in Bamenda, so I feel like a real village woman, carrying bucket upon bucket of water to the flowers and veges. I should have just walked to Bamenda and got the hose!
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