The Difference 45 Hours Can Make

My current schedule is "long day, long day, long day, night, night, off, off." And goodness, can a lot change in two nights off. Sunday when I left at 11 am (after a paperwork fiasco) we had 5 total patients. We admitted 4 Sunday and 7! on Monday. Monday we lost one of the Sunday admissions. The majority of them came in quite sick. We lost a 4 yr old this morning who was "co-infected" with Ebola and malaria. With either Ebola or malaria, the 5 and younger do not do well. With both, survival is close to nil :'( we got many results back today; 6 positive Ebola cases. 2 of those 6 we have already lost. On the happier side, we were able to discharge the one lady remaining from the funeral today! She is cured!! She danced and danced. Funny creatures, we humans are. When one person begins to improve, the others see it and their morale changes. The husband may surprise us yet. Another woman is on the mend. She has had one negative test and we drew her second one today.
On the converse side, however, when one significantly worsens or dies, it again changes morale and we tend to lose more:( Like the oldest lady of the 4. She was doing so well...then her friend died and she died shortly thereafter:'-( She surprised us all. She had been eating  bananas and drinking the O.R.S. like a champ! But she gave up once her friend died.

I think Ebola in West Africa will continue to ebb and flow for awhile. We heard yesterday of a family of about 40 near our other ETC site that actually hid the body of a child who died of Ebola. That site has had less than 5 patients for almost 2 weeks. But now, they are seeing several come in from that family. It's so hard...because the majority of people that enter the ETC-the confirmed ward-do not leave cured. And the ones that die-there isn't closure because we cannot open the body bags to show the family.

There are tents behind the ETC where families can come to visit their family members...but their family members have to be well enough to get outside and well enough to be able to speak audibly across the two meter distance. It is difficult for some of the family members to get to the ETC. Some live in extremely remote villages. The medical side of me understands the danger of Ebola and the need for caution and safe burials and isolation & quarantine; but the human, family-oriented side of me recognizes how much I would want to see my family if I was sick or if they were sick, especially if I or they were essentially handed a death sentence of a disease that kills quickly. And closure is huge in the grieving process. But then, my grandfather always said, "If you don't visit me when I am alive, don't bother when I am gone."

On a different note, and my family will appreciate this: we don't get many vegetables (a reoccurring  theme I have discovered in my travels) and tonight, we had some! But they were sugar snap peas!!! But don't you worry, family, I ate them all! I guess a need to have vegetables in my diet (and the drilled in from a young age "you eat what you are served!") overcame my loathing of sugar snap peas!