Michele on the Africa Mercy: The Night Shift

I'm working my first night shift tonight and you can tell how busy I am since I'm writing an update here. When I worked nights back home, we rarely had time to sit down so this is very different. We can even sleep for an hour or so if we need to - we'd get fired for that in the States. I guess things are different when they aren't paying you.

I have orthopedic patients and children tonight, neither of whom I am comfortable with. My twelve year old patient David had a club foot repaired. Club feet are relatively common in the U.S. but we fix them when they are babies. Here, they can only get it fixed if they happen to get to a Mercy Ship. Mercy Ships generally focuses on kids with club feet rather than adults - mainly to give kids a better chance at life and adult repairs are more difficult and require ongoing care. Here are two little ones with club feet that will have repairs done sometime in the next two weeks.

Another of our younger patients is 11 year old Jarwee. He actually came to the ship for his surgery alone - really...he traveled from his village to the ship alone. He arrived a day early as most of them do and he was very shy and scared. A family member came for a short time during his surgery but then left so Jarwee woke up from surgery alone, in pain with a bunch of strangers around. It's just so hard to believe. It makes me think of my 11 year old friend Parker traveling for hours alone to a big city, showing up at a hospital and then going through the admission process, surgery and recovery alone. He's 11. I can't imagine. Jarwee has really opened up to the nurses and is a very playful, ornery kid. He asked his nurse tonight to pray with him at bedtime.

Here's a couple of our younger patients recovering from their club foot repair surgeries. Most of them don't have blocks or puzzles or toys that we are used to so they love our toys.

One of my older patients is 70 year old Mary. She had a repair of a non-union femur bone. Do you know what that means? It means her thigh bone broke in half completely and she has been walking around with that broken leg for 10 years. Yes, she walked here with it. I feel a little bad for her - she's in a ward with 7 little kids.

On another note, we had a Celebration of Sight last Friday for all eye patients. We want eye patients to return to the ship for a follow up exam but most of them won't do it because of the difficulties to get here (cost plus transportation). The eye team decided to have a big celebration to entice people back to the ship and it worked. 185 eye patients returned for the celebration. These 185 people were blind from cataracts and all received their sight back. It was a day of African music, food and eye exams. Here are some pictures from the celebration.