Melissa Halliday’s Blog

The last few days….

…have been EXHAUSTING! I think a lot of it is just the culmination of 3 weeks of hard work, altered sleep schedules, and the HEAT!! The heat is so intense, every day I go to bed completely exhausted and usually pretty early! This will be a short post, but I just wanted to update you all on what’s going on.

First of all, thanks so much for all of the prayers for the baby I talked about in the last post. It has been a frustrating uphill battle for the last few days, but I think we’re making small differences. The grandmother still has no interest in feeding the baby and I’m pretty sure she hates me. I’m OK with that though, as long as this baby is fed! The baby is still severely malnourished, but has been eating more (only because I’m stopping by every few hours to make sure she’s fed!!). It’s frustrating because often the message doesn’t get passed on to the nursing staff of the next shift and/or they just don’t care to check on this child as much as they should. Today I made a log sheet for the baby to be fed 60mls of the protein solution every two hours and it is to be logged. There have been marks made on the log sheet…whether or not the baby is actually getting the food I don’t know, but it’s at least a start.

The baby looks slightly better. The abdomen is not as distended and while the fontanel is still sunken (from being dehydrated) it is not as bad as it was. It will take several weeks of refeeding to get this baby back to health, but hopefully with good care she will be healthy again. I did find out that her mother is sick with HIV but apparently was on antiretroviral medications. Hopefully the baby did not contract this through delivery or breast milk. Unfortunately, due to the antibodies that are present in babies from their mothers you can’t get an accurate test for HIV until they are a little older, so we just don’t know at this point if the baby is HIV positive or not.

As far as pictures, yes, with the grandmother’s permission I took pictures of the baby yesterday. The baby still looks sick in these pictures but not nearly what she had the day before. I will try to take pictures before I leave Saboba so I can see what progress the baby has made. I can’t give out the name for two reasons: 1) since she’s a patient in the hospital, even though this is rural Ghana I have to respect her privacy, and 2) even if I could give it out I don’t think I could pronounce it, much less spell it.

I’ll keep you all updated on things as they progress, but I just wanted to thank you all for the prayers and let you know that God is working here! Keep praying that the hearts of the grandmother and father will be changed and they will start to want to take care of this child. Also pray that the nursing staff will take some responsibility for this patient and give her the care she needs. Lastly, pray that the child will grow stronger each day so that she can finally be healthy again!

Thanks again so much guys! I really appreciate it more than I can say.

Melissa