Saturday Night Meds

Well, Anita and I just got home from giving the kids their 8 PM medications.  No one else wanted Sat. night!  This should have been a quick visit, but we're the admit nurses and don't know nuthin' about what goes on there at night! It took a long time and was almost funny with mostly me asking Anita, where is the paracetamol (that's Tylenol in England)? Where's the syringes?  How do you give them 125 mg (tablets are 500 mg) Where do you get this and that?  The ward helpers saved us.  They are educated, local girls that speak English and Wolof (local language) and translate for us, but they also know what's going on and we don't.  Every day, Anita and I get in at 7 AM and get the patients ready for surgery and have never even been in the hospital at night!  In addition to not being able to find things and trying to figure out how their medication administration sheets work, first a mosquito net gets caught in the overhead fan and made some godawful noise (someone then turned it on to see if it was "OK"), then the lights go out three times--never for very long, and then the ward helpers tell us that  the water has been off since yesterday afternoon.  I didn't have the guts to even look at what was going on in the patient's bathroom!  This ward has 26 patients that have at least one family member, usually more, that sleep on the same twin bed as the patient. Most of these people live without mosquito nets, electricity, or running water so no big deal.  Hope we didn't over or under medicate anyone and that everyone is OK for another night.  The gratitude of the parents still amazes me.  They want to shake our hands, they smile and thank us and now since several kids have had their surgery, they want to proudly show us their children and their new faces.

I've not been so happy to have a job over in a long time.  It felt so good to put our cart away, take some cracker jacks and head back to our hi end hotel!