You might wonder about what I mean in the title till you remember I work in a clinic. Last Thursday I was sitting in my room getting ready to write a post on here when I heard my fellow nurse, Breanna, being called to go check out the crowd that carried someone into clinic. She radioed back that the person was unconscious, and me being nosy and wanting to be around if she needed help, went over. The older man was lying there snoring rather loudly, and couldn’t be wakened. I asked for the story and a man stepped forward out of the crowd of about 50 jabbering people. Apparently the unconscious man was working with him in the field this morning, and started to “dekonpoze” or feel faint, and then he passed out. I think the Creole word for fainting is kind of funny, it is very close to and also means to decompose. Back to my story, I asked if he had eaten anything that morning? ”No, but he drank some ‘alkol’ ” There I had it! He was hypoglycemic. Not eating, drinking something alcoholic…. sure enough, the blood sugar test read Low. I helped Breanna put him on an IV of dextrose, we put some glucose in his cheeks, and within 15 minutes he had come round and was trying to figure out what had happened. But what does this have to do with a broken head? His friends in their concerned rush to the clinic, made a bamboo stretcher to carry him with. For whatever reason, it broke on the way in, and spilled the poor man onto the rocks giving him a nice 1″ cut above his eye. So after he recovered from his low blood sugar attack, I had to stitch him up. He really was a nice old man, and when I asked him if he was ready for me to stitch his head, he answered, “yes, if you please”. We fixed him up, and the crowd left with him to take him home.
No more than 10 minutes later another crowd came in, this time with a little boy who was unconscious. He had been kicked in the head by a mule. His mom passed their house leading the mule and he ran out after them unbeknownst to her. The little tyke had a great lump on his head, but it really wasn’t bleeding. What concerned us was that he went unresponsive 30 minutes after being kicked, not right away. So Michael sat with him for the next 30 minutes, and checked on him throughout the night, rousing him and keeping an eye on his pupils and the other ” increased brain pressure” indicators. (Don’t laugh if you are medical and this sounds funny, tell me a better way to say it.) By the next morning he was fine, walking, talking, a normal 4-year-old.
Yesterday, Sunday, I was on call. We had just got home from church, and were getting ready to eat lunch when Breanna and I were called to clinic. I was immediately wondering what I would find since we were both called at once. There sat a 10-year-old boy with a cloth wrapped around his head. Great, another head injury! He couldn’t remember what had happened, and the man who was with him was hyper and didn’t know much. I found out later he didn’t even know the boy’s name, I honestly don’t know how he was connected to him. The most I could gather was that he fell onto a rock, and his shoulder and arm were bruised and scraped as well. The wound was a crush cut, and the boy’s thick hair was way down in the cut. It took a lot of careful picking and trimming of the pulverized flesh and hair before the wound was ready to be stitched. I didn’t know if I would ever get done cleaning it out; this was the first really messy cut I have had to clean up. But with Breanna’s good help, we got done, and wrapped up his head. I kept him over night to make sure he was ok, he had come from an hours walk away and I didn’t feel right about sending him home immediately. His mom came, and spent the night with him, and the hyper man left.
Then, the smile of the week–Friday night we had a birth. Just after the baby was born we were suctioning it’s nose and mouth, hadn’t even cut the cord yet, when I heard “Mis, Mis”. I looked up, and the aunt motioned toward the baby then squeezed her own cheeks between two fingers. I immediately understood, and very deliberately reached down and gave the baby girl dimples. Yes, the Haitians believe that if you squeeze the baby’s cheeks just after it is born, you can give it dimples. I haven’t ever been asked to do that before, but it sure made me smile!
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