Advance for Nurses published the first person account of Family Nurse Practitioner Michelle Telford-Vegas's experience on CHW's medical mission to Guatemala. Michelle joined us on our first mission in 2007 as well. She is the manager of the family health clinics operated by our Mercy Hospital of Folsom.
Here's a taste of the full piece:
Our patients came in with a wide variety of ailments and complaints. In La Cuesta, I examined a mom and her four kids, ages 6 months, 2, 4 and 7 years old. They were obviously very poor as was their hygiene. The kids all had colds and the mom told me the children's father had died. She was raising the kids on her own and her chief reason to see us was she had a headache. I just thought to myself, "Of course you do!" Still, she was most concerned with her children's health. They all needed treatment. One had pretty severe diarrhea. When I talked to her about the food available in the house, she said they only had tortillas and beans. The normal advice of eating bananas, bread and rice to treat diarrhea was ridiculous. All I could do was educate her about boiling water and prescribe some medications that would temporarily ease her kids' symptoms.
Another experience that stayed with me was the search to find the home of a 3-month-old baby who needed critical care. A local doctor who joined us on our trip had seen the baby a few days earlier for severe respiratory illness and possible sepsis and sent the child to the local hospital in Chanmugua. The hospital discharged the baby without providing the necessary care and the doctor feared the baby was in grave danger. Along with a pediatric ICU nurse, emergency physician, IV fluids and antibiotics, we drove a "tuk-tuk" (a small, three-wheeled moto-taxi without a lot of power) up a hill in a remote area of Esquipulas to try to find the baby's home.
We traveled through a very poor part of town where all the homes were fashioned from mud. There was no electricity in many areas and it was very dark. Some roads were so bad the tuk-tuk couldn't pull us so we had to walk. We eventually found the home and discovered the baby had gone into respiratory arrest twice since being seen. We just missed the mother (who had already lost two children) and baby who had gone back to the hospital via tuk-tuk. We later learned the baby was septic and died. The rest of the kids living in the house - all 11 of them - were just waiting for mom to come home. These kids were standing there in the dark with no shoes, no food and no water, but the oldest child had a cell phone!
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