Via the Peoria Journal Star, Dr. John Carroll wins another temporary victory: Tempered Happiness in Haiti. Excerpt:
The Haitian Public Health nurses working in this cramped tiny room tucked away on the second floor of St. Catherine's Hospital in Soleil save many little lives EACH day. With salt and sugar mixed in a bag of sterile water. And they magically intuit where tiny collapsed veins course under the skin without being able to see or feel them.
This one year old girl was lying fairly lifeless with her eyes sunk and half closed two hours before this photo. She was one of a jillion babies and toddlers in Cite Soleil today with terrible vomiting and diarrhea. They finally get so weak they refuse the breast and they all seem to hate oral rehydration solution.
So with some history from the mother, the look of the child and the mother, the status of the child's lips and eyes, and your OWN gut reaction, you throw out all other rules that use to seem important to you, and start an IV on the patient.
And after just a little while they all wake up and look around. And the blan doctors are all so happy, but the Haitian nurses keep their poker faces and take it all for granted. Because being this ill is taken for granted in Soleil.
