hospital visit

Mary has been helping us with fetching water for about 5 months now. She lives a few doors away with her 2 children; the oldest, 7yr old Lokul Grace, has epilepsy. Two days ago during a seizure she fell into Mary’s cooking fire scorching the inside of her right thigh. When I reached our local hospital yesterday morning, a few people greeted me and asked about nurse Michelle, a future teammate that spent a week working in the wards with them, then I went to pray with Grace. She was sleeping as I looked at the angry, oozing 3rd degree burn, the size of a dinner plate, the center dotted with rabbit fur remnants – a local medicine used for burns. The hospital had no other treatment applied, just some meds for pain and epilepsy with a light antibiotic. After praying for comfort, healing and wisdom for the doctors I went home to see what supplies. A team from Our Father’s House (Chili, Wi) had just brought some non-adhering bandages and catheters that I grabbed together with the last of my ‘burn crème’ from a Dutch friend. I returned to the hospital after the staff had wheeled her into the theatre – I was anxious when I found her bed empty, but other patients guided me to find Grace’s worried mother just emerging from the prep area where she held Grace’s hand as she went under injectable anaesthesia. She urged me to go inside and talk to the doctors, and it’s a good thing I did. They were excited about the new supplies and had never seen many of the donated items and had me demonstrate how to use them. Mary just came over to update me this morning around 7am – Grace is doing well and wants to go home! We’ll do another bandage change tomorrow and meanwhile the hospital is trying different seizure meds to help control it better. Pray for wisdom. Pray also for Sofia, another patient that I’ve been visiting that seems to currently be starving herself. She has HIV/AIDS – a growing problem that was virtually non-existent in Karamoja a few years ago.
Thank goodness there’s a cow vet around to train local medical staff, thank God that these supplies arrived just in time to help Grace