Amelia Wiggins’ Blog

amelia earhart

i flew over the indian ocean today! we have 2 far away clinics that we send doctors to every friday. the plane is a 4 seater, just big enough for me, 2 docs and the pilot named jhraak (pronounced shark which i thought was funny). i’ll upload the pics once i edit them. anyway we went first over sibhaya lake, which is on the map i posted, and landed at the first clinic, mabibi. there we saw 4 patients. it is one of the wealthier towns so not as many sick people. usually in the mobile clinics we see anywhere from 20-50 patients. from there we loaded the plane again and headed out over the indian ocean…beautiful!! in the fall (sept) you can see whales and sharks but not today. and you can also see hippos, crocodiles and other african wildlife in the lake but we didn’t see any today :(  we landed in another town for the next clinic. there we saw about 20 patients between the 3 of us.   The view was so amazing and the weirdest part was the landing strip… or the lack of landing strip I should say, we simply took of and came down in a big field! Definitely a highlight so far!!very frustrating today was a 32 year old man with HIV, he could not understand why i could not start him on ARV (antiretrovirals). he had been to the hospital 2 days before for kaposi sarcoma, a skin condition that is an aids defining illness. on his records the doc had written, ’start arvs NOW” so here he was scared to death and wanting his meds. the problem was that we need certain lab results before giving someone arvs. it’s a long process of being sure their liver functions properly, they don’t have hep B, checking kidney function and blood level…. after that the patient then starts a training program to be sure they are responsible enough to take the arvs. its a strict schedule and once you start you can not stop or the hiv will develop resistance and then we have a real problem. our patient was at the first step of waiting for his lab results. i explained the process to him through a translator that i’m not sure even understood english. at the end he kept saying, ‘no i need them now’ since the note from the hospital said NOW. you could see the fear in his eyes. people here sometimes don’t realize they can live without arvs for many years, when they hear they are hiv + they hear an immediate death sentence. i tried my best to tell him he was well enough to wait a few weeks. in the end i don’t know if he understood. i can only hope he did.  that in a nut shell is the most frustrating part of being here. i want to talk to these people but i’m stuck watching a translator, who knows nothing about medicine and very little about english, try to get a history and then relay it to me. i wonder how much pertinent information is slipping through the cracks…