Kanti

Last Friday I went to Kanti children’s hospital with Katie. Kanti is the only children’s hospital in Nepal, so SAV (same who run mobile clinics), has a Ronald McDonald type house where families can stay while their children are in the hospital. SAV also pays for the medical procedures that the child needs, including food and medicine. I went on ward visits with volunteers, which is when you go to see how the patients they take care of are doing. It was intense, especially since hospitals here are quite different from home. In America you walk into a hospital and the smell of disinfectant burns you nose, everything is white and sterile. Patient confidentiality is closely guarded by HIPPA and even as volunteers you are lectured on the importance of this. At Kanti the first smell was that of the bathrooms mixed in with a faint bleach scent. The whole hospital is open, meaning hallways and walkways are not enclosed, which the effects of the elements can be seen everywhere, from the patients rooms, to the halls. Patient information is on open charts that are at the end of the beds. There are no dividers, and patient’s rooms are big open rooms, filled with beds that are surrounded by glass windows that look into the other rooms. There is no little old lady who stops you as you walk in, anyone can walk into any ward. And there are two very distinct wards, which are highlighted by the signs above them. Paying Ward and General Ward (Non-paying). The cancer and cardiac wards are together, followed by the burn ward. You remove your shoes and place sandals provided when going into any of the wards, except the Oncology ward where you are barefoot, and the General Ward, where you wear your shoes. In the general ward SAV also takes care of three abandoned children, 2 with hyperciosis which is when fluid forms around the brain, causing the child’s head to swell. This is treatable when caught in time, which it never is in Nepal. The children are 4 (which is a year more then she was given) and 1, and both their heads are at least 10x’s their normal size. The third child is 10 months old and was ephicsiated either during, right before or right after birth, so she is incredibly small for her age and deformed. All three children are considered hospice patients. Which is sad when you realize that all of these conditions are treatable. We started the ward visits in the Burn ward, which to be honest was something I didn’t think I could do. After switching shoes, we found our patient. I walked into a bare room and saw in the corner a 2-year-old boy with 30% of his body burned. He was sitting up in bed, watching the football field out his window, eating a banana. Most of his burns were on his face, arms, and upper chest. His Grandpa was with him, and you could just feel how much he loved his grandson. We asked him how he was doing and feeling, and he responded by singing us a song. It was the sweetest thing I’ve seen in awhile. And the whole time he was singing his Grandpa was just smiling so proudly. That was the one of the warmest moments I have had in Nepal. I can still hear his sweet little voice sing that song.
From there we went to the oncology ward where two patients are and usually the volunteers bring toys, but since none of the toys are clean enough to bring up to a cancer patient, they didn’t have any. Katie has suggested different toys for the Oncology floor, but the response is always the same, we have no money, what can we do? Then we went down to the General ward where we went into the severe mal-nutrition room. There was a four-year-old child who weighed less then her 1-year-old sister. This was really intense to see, because they were diagnosing her with malnutrition, but there was obviously more wrong, since the women’s three other children were healthy, and this little girl was eating. But to see not only her but also all of the other small children was hard. Many of them go to the Malnutrition clinic where they can receive more individualized treatment. There was a woman there who the nurses were trying to tell that her son needed to go to the Malnutrition clinic. The woman did not want to take him because she wanted to go home since her husband just left her for older wealthier woman. I learned that this is not uncommon; that men will often leave their wives for other women, especially if they are poor and the woman is not. However, a woman cannot leave her husband, yet must accept that her husband has left her. So this woman was not only dealing with an incredibly ill child but the possibility of no longer having a husband. She decided to not go to the clinic, which inevitably decided her son’s fate as well.
In the next room we visited I met a dad, Danesh, whose son, Rajish, had “phenomena like problem.” Katie was donating blood for Rajish because he needed more blood, which was an interesting ordeal itself. One of the volunteers asked Katie what her blood type was and then she was off to donate. She went into a room where the nurse had someone hold her upper arm like a cuff while she tried to find a vein; she then took a sample of blood to see if it was a match to the sample from Rajish. We waited an hour and then she went and donated the rest. It was really cool to see the child that the blood would help, and the father went with us the whole way, which was sweet. He wanted to donate blood but is unable to. It’s just really encouraging to see a male figure, especially a father and husband in such a positive light, especially right after hearing about the other woman’s husband.
Kanti, was an overwhelming place in general, from the smells, to the biohazard materials that fall out of the open garbage’s, to the amazing strength of both patients and workers. And it had an interesting effect on me. I always assumed that I couldn’t work in a medical setting because I couldn’t handle things like the burn ward, but I am realizing that maybe I shut things out too soon. I understand it is only one experience and you can’t judge all after one, but I also am realizing that maybe there are more options in my future then I thought.