First day of work

Day one at the hospital…probably one of the most memorable, life changing, and challenging days of my life. I could honestly compare this to my wedding day…in a sense of “I will never forget this”. When I decided I wanted to study nursing abroad I knew I would be thrown in to a situation that would be…uncomfortable for a lack of a better word.  

When I arrived to the postpartum floor Anne the manager of that unit (she is actually a midwife) had me go with Kimani. Kimani is a nursing intern, as in he was a nursing student for 2 years (just like in the US) and then they are required to complete an internship for one year. After he finishes his internship he will be done with school and have his BSN. Although he is still considered a student, he doesn’t report to a nurse or get permission for any tasks he does. Him and I passed medications today just like we were 2 nurses in the states today. Their med passing system is totally different than anything a hospital would allow in the states. For starters, it took us 25 minutes to find Magnesium Sulfate, which is a very important drug in any preeclamptic patient. The postpartum floor didn’t have any so we had to run to L&D (Labor and delivery). It literally seemed as if we were asking for someone to cut off their arm to help us find the medication. Kimani explained to me that nurses are so busy with their own patients (20 patients to a nurse) they don’t like to stop and help others. They will just ignore you or tell you to go ask someone else. After we finally got the medication we went back to the Postpartum unit and administered it. We then continued to pass medications, main hypertensive drugs and antibiotics. The clinicians ordered morphine for almost all of the patients we had on our side (72) and after the first patient the morphine was gone. Since the morphine was gone we just gave injections of Ibuprofen as a substitute. After the first 10 patients….the gloves were gone. Can you imagine…being in a hospital where there are no gloves? And you have to walk out of the unit to the nurses station to the closest sink to wash your hands (with bar soap). And keeping in mind you have over 70 patients to pass medications to…CRAZY! We started passing 8 o clock medications at 940…and finished at 1110.

I forgot to mention what I did before passing meds. The first thing we did was cord care for the babies (cleaning the cords). After Kimani did the first one we then split up and each did half. After doing the first 3, Kimani came over and said we only do it for the patients who have never done it before. It is the mothers responsibility to do the cord care since the hospitals don’t have the staffing or the time to go and do each patient individually. This is convenient…my swahillian sucks…and majority of these patient don’t speak English. So it was like a guessing game of who actually knew what they were doing and who didn’t. I quickly learned if they take the piece of cotton that was soaked in an antiseptic wash without looking at me as if I’m from another planet (which most of them do anyways since I’m American) I figured they knew what they were doing. This took us like an hour (are you now seeing why medications were passed so late?). So after the cord care we began to pass medications.

When medications were finished being passed Kimani said to me, “do you take tea?” Now…keep in mind I don’t know what taking tea is (maybe because I’ve lived such a sheltered like in Illinois?) but I said…”nope I’ve never done that…do the patients all get tea?” He laughed at me and then clarified that we are actually the ones taking tea…which I then realized was like break. So Kimani and I went into the nursing supervisors, Anne, office and visited with her and Kimani and I visited. While visiting with Kimani I realized that he is actually wanting to get out of Kenya and come to the US to do graduate work and just work in better conditions but he said it is so hard for them to get Visas into the US. He has applied to 2 different graduate programs, one in Georgia and one in Tennessee but it is impossible for him to afford the application fees so he is kind of at a stand still now. It just breaks my heart knowing there is this smart intelligent student over here who wants to better his entire life…and the ability to get a visa stands in the way?...blah. Maybe I’ll do some research to see what I can find out…if any of you know anything about the whole visa process let me know J.

Anyways…back to the hospital experience. So I am kind of jumping all around because so much happened today, and I apologize…this blog entry is probably like trying to get through a corn maze blindfolded. The whole postpartum floor has a total of 84 beds…so if you do the math..some of the mothers, well most actually, are sharing beds. That means…2 moms to a bed…and if there is a mom with twins..that is 5 patients to a bed. And when they are very busy there is 3 moms to a bed….can you imagine? Privacy, self-respect, and any sort of personal space…out the window. Also...I saw 4 cats and 2 kittens running the floors of the unit today.

Back to tea time…Kimani and I were also talking about the differences in the US hospitals compared to the hospitals here. He was saying that he has heard about hospitals being shut down because they don’t meet certain regulations. I tried explaining to him that IDPH (Illinois Department of Public Health) does checks with the hospitals and the hospitals have certain expectations they need to meet. The hospitals get graded and then get their reviews and they have a certain amount of time to correct their faults and then they are re-evaulated- surprisingly, as in they don’t know when IDPH will show up at the hospitals. I’m clearly no IDPH expert and don’t really know all of the in’s and out’s…but I get the jist and know enough to know…these hospitals wouldn’t be sufficient in any way, shape, or form. Honestly, the horses at my family farm live in better conditions then these patients are in during their hospital visit. Remember, this is a public hospital…and not all hospitals are like this. Their private hospitals are not like our hospitals but they are much better conditioned to care for patients.

We are going to visit the orphanage Thursday afternoon and I couldn’t be more excited. I feel like every day here is like Christmas morning. I am so excited but I never know what the day has in store. Ahh. Did I ever mention how much I love Africa? J On a lighter more not so hospital note…I woke up with uhm…give or take 20 mosquito bites? Good think I’m taking malaria tablets. There is like 4 bites on my face…Kimani says to me at “tea time”…. “Mosquitos getting to you?” Uhhh ya think? I only have them EVERYWHERE! Haha New method to my sleeping tonight…long sleeved shirt and new sheets…hopefully this helps.

I apologize for the jumping from place to place…I’ve never been a good writer and there are so many different things I want to share with you guys that I can’t seem to keep them in any sort of chronological order! I’ll work on it!

 Jioni njema,

Abigail

"There is no better exercise for your heart than reaching down and helping to lift someone up." 
-- Bernard Meltzer

Sang, a pre med student and I before our first day!