The Road to Gimbie Letters

07/16/01

Dear Family and Friends,

It has been a while since I have written. The entire country of Ethiopia has had e-mail problems, but they seem to have been worse over the past couple of months. In addition to that, I have been really busy with Dr. Rose gone for the past nearly three months.

During the time that Dr. Rose has been gone, we have had a challenging time for our surgeon. Our surgeon just finished residency and took general surgery. He has had the opportunity to do brain surgery on three different patients. All of these three patients were suffering from trauma. All had been attacked. A while ago I mentioned that we had some axe murders in Gimbie. Dr. Debebe, our relief surgeon from Addis, removed bone fragments from the skull of a two-year-old child. The child is now running and playing in the streets of Gimbie. Another patient was the grandmother of this child and she died a few days after the surgery due to the wounds caused by the axe.

Another man came in not long ago. He was hit in the head with a stick and this caused a fragment of bone to be crushed into the old man's head. This man was about 74 years old. Dr. Debebe did surgery and removed the bone fragment. Now the old man is walking around and has nearly complete use of his hand, where before he could barely move the hand. That is a real miracle. We have continued to be blessed on a regular basis and I wish I could tell you about them all, but at least the brain surgeries are quite a miracle.

We have also kept our surgeon busy in other ways. We had a very busy 48-hour period last week. We had eight c-sections in 48 hours. In addition to this, there was a small intestine blockage surgery (or should I say unblockage) and a tumor removal surgery. The poor guy really worked hard last week. This is the rainy season and the hospital is usually not very busy, and it has not been except for the c-sections and also Friday the 13th. This has traditionally been a good day for me, but this was a busy one. I was called to the delivery room and the nurse was trying to get a patient to deliver, but her labor had slowed down. We started a medicine to speed it up. Just at that time, there was an auto accident and we ended up with nine casualties. The first one died en route to the hospital and there was not much we could do. The second one has some deep cuts on the face and a head injury. There are three medical students from Loma Linda here right now and I called them to come and help. They have finished their first year and have not had any clinical experience yet, but they got plenty that day.

I started one of them sewing up the scalp of one of the patients and then I got called to the delivery room again. There was another woman who had come into the hospital with very severe vaginal bleeding. She had delivered a baby had home two weeks before and had been bleeding quite a bit since then, but suddenly had a lot of bleeding. When I checked her, I discovered half the placenta half in and half out of the cervix. I had to remove it right away to stop the bleeding and had to scrape out the uterus. Just as I was doing this, the other lady in the bed right next to her decided that it was time to deliver, so I had two of the medical students do the delivery while I was working in the bed next to her removing the uterus. The newborn baby then did not want to [breathe], so I prayed, took off my outer layer of gloves and helped to jump-start the little one and then put on another outer layer of gloves and finished up the job I had started.

I then ran back to the emergency room and helped to take care of the other seven patients that needed to be seen from the auto accident. Actually, eight of them were in the car, but one person was actually in a house and the car ran off the road and crashed into her mud house and smashed it all to pieces and gave her a skull fracture and a bruised back. It took from just after lunch until 8 in the evening for us to get everyone taken care of. The last guy had a dislocated shoulder and it did not want to relocate. We tried several methods. What finally worked was a heavy load of Valium and a quick twist and it finally went back in, thanks to the presence of our very busy surgeon, at least for that week.

This week has been slow in the wards and so I am finally finishing this. The other good news is that Dr. Rose will be arriving tomorrow in Addis and will be out here in a week. I will be very glad. Administration is not my forte.

One more update, they started putting up some of the rafters for the roof of the new construction site this week. It really made us all happy to see this happen because it makes it look like a lot of stuff is happening. I will try to get a picture this coming week and send it with the next Road to Gimbie. We can be thankful that the phones and e-mail are up now.

Until then, take care.

Sincerely in Christ,

Nick, Phosfe, Christopher and Ian Walters