So this week has been going kind of slow, since the weather has been really nasty and rainy. On Monday, I saw the most malnourished baby that I have ever seen…definitely the sickest baby I have ever seen that has not been in the NICU. A mom brought in her 12 day old for a well baby check. She said the baby was born premature, at somewhere between 32-34 weeks, and was kept in the hospital for 2 days. She went to unwrap the baby, and I hae seen a lot, and it takes a lot to shock me, but I was absolutely shocked at the sight of this baby. It was tiny, with arms and legs skinnier than a pencil. It’s skin was all shriveled up, and it’s face looked like an old person…it almost looked like a mummy. I couldn’t believe this baby was still alive. I asked the mom if there were any problems, and she replied that there weren’t and that the baby was breastfeeding just fine. We undressed the baby, and I was honestly afraid to pick up this baby and put it on the scale, because I was afraid I would hurt her if I moved her. We put her on the scale, and she weighed 1.2 kilograms. She had weighed 1.5kg at birth, meaning she had lost 18% of her birthweight, which was already really low. Andrea saw her right away, and told the mom that she needed to be admitted. At first the mother refused, but Andrea told her flat out that the baby would die if she went home and continued like this. Both Dr. Gross and Andrea agreed that the baby should be in a NICU, but since no such thing exists here, they put her in an incubator in the pediatric ward. They wanted to give her an NG tube to get nutrition, but were unable to. Apparently the baby was so tiny that when they put the tube in, the baby became apneic, due to the tiny size of her tubes. They also tried to put an IV in, but the baby was so tiny and so dehyrated that they could not put one in anywhere. Instead, they ended up trying to syringe feed her orally, which is still what they are doing, until she is hydrated enough that they can get a line in. The most shocking thing about this situation was that the mother had a two year old child as well, but still had no idea that something was drastically wrong with her baby.
On Tuesday, we had a four year old girl come in today with a cyst on her eyelid, which she had for 2 years and which scratched and irritated her eye when she blinked. They were going to try to send her to the mainland to an opthamologist, which of course would be costly, but I remembered Peggy mentioning that she had an opthamologist coming down to her clinic in March. I called Peggy, and ended up taking all of this girl’s information, along with pictures of the eye to send to the opthamologist in the states. Hopefully, it will be something he can fix, and it will save her family a very costly trip to the mainland.
As of Thursday, they still had not put an NG tube into our malnorished baby, who had now been in the hospital for 4 days. Dr. Gross brought our baby scale into the ward, since they don’t have an accurate scale on the ward. He weighed the baby on our scale, and the baby still weighed 1.2 kg, exactly the same she had been 4 days ago. We had Peggy bring over a couple of NG tubes, since they said they didn’t have any at the hospital. That afternoon, Lydia put a tube in the baby, and the baby is already looking better.
Friday was pretty slow, probably because of the rain, and so we finished clinic early and spent time with Dr. Gross. He is leaving this weekend, which is really sad, because he is an amazing doctor and I learned so much from him. We all went out to dinner at Romeos in French Harbor, which was nice for his last Friday night. Next week will just be me, Andrea, and Lydia, so hopefully things won’t be too crazy.
