Giant exhale.

We made it through another day. Me and lori and all the staff and all of the patients. It was such an emotional roller coaster. Dehydrated kids might be some of the scariest patients I have taken care of. What beats a sugar of 29? That would be a sugar of 24. They are so hard to manage when you have very few resources to assess their status. Then they are up and playing and acting great so you finally give them their antibiotics to treat the cholera and they projectile vomit ALL OVER THE PLACE. It's awesome. Sometimes things were totally under control and I had time to do some charting and then Lori leaves me for 2 hours and I promise I will only call her if it is and absolute emergency. Well it was.

I am alone with the staff, with whom I can hardly communicate with and someone knocks on the gate. I run out to see a crowd of people with a patient lying on a bed. Words cannot describe to you what I saw. This girl looks like a skeleton with skin draped on it. Her eyeballs were so sunken in her head that her eyelids were detached from them. Her tongue was completely furled and her toes and fingers looked like she had been dead for hours. I didn't even give them time to bring her inside I just started working on her right inside the gate. I could not find a single pulse in her body. Absolutely one of the scariest moments in my life. Her veins were so flat and fragile that it took me about 8 sticks before I could get a line in. It had a small leak but I didn't care I just had someone squeeze the bag and get in as much as they could. Then she projectile vomitted about 1000 cc of yuck ALL OVER THE PLACE. I got another line started in the same hand and by that time Lori had run all the way up the mountain to rescue me. She got another line in at the same time and we pushed 4000 cc of LR in about 30 minutes. Y'all, I will never be able to describe to you what happened over the next hour. This 15 year old girl came back to life. She opened her eyes and was able to talk. She even kept telling us how hungry she was. Of course, we did not let her eat :) Lori and I sat down to watch her and we refueld with a diet coke and laughed at the thought of trying to tell anybody about these things.

I didn't get a chance to take a picture of her but here are some shots I took during some down time today.

There are several patients who need serious prayer tonight.

This is Mireline, who I wrote about yesterday. She had a better day, but still isn't great. Continue to pray for her healing.

This is Fleurilis. I briefly wrote about him above, bad sugars, super vomitty and can't keep anything down. I am really worried about him tonight.

Diueverson (sounds like Jefferson) has been here for 4 days and is hardly making any progress. We have tried almost everything but it is not really clear what is going on with him. He continues do have diarrhea and now having difficulty breathing. Please, please pray that God would give us wisdom with his treatment and that he would be healed!

Two older girls, including the one who came in this afternoon are having continued vomitting and cannot keep anything down.

And praise Jesus for another great day with Moseline! One of her older sisters came to visit and they had a great time.

"He will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.

⁹ In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

Isaiah 25:8-9