Our First Day At Tamale Teaching Hospital

WoW is all I can say. Not sure if I can find the right words to describe everything I saw, examined, and felt inside today as we toured the hospital and got a taste of 3rd world medicine. We were also pleasantly surprised by some of the cool things that the hospital has gotten/is working on building.
Some first day of school pics...

As you can imagine, the hospital was very crowded and very hot. Many rooms are smaller than your bedrooms and crammed with multiple beds. At our children's hospital back in Louisville, most rooms are private and all rooms have flat screen tvs, pull out beds, video games, etc. These beds/cribs are wrought iron, and the parents (typically the mothers) are responsible for caring for them, feeding them, washing them, etc. They either sit on the floor next to the patient's crib or they sit in a plastic chair. And they usually are sharing the room with up to 15 other patients and their parents. Also it is a breast-feeding culture (often the only sustenance the baby gets) so it is not uncommon for a mother to feed her child in front of everyone. The hospital does provide porridge to the inpatients, which is nice and takes some stress away from the family.

 I should also mention that it was over 95 degrees out there and humid. The hospital lost power for about 2 hours while we were there; it was absolutely sweltering with no fans. Really makes you appreciate general comfort.

In the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit), you might find 2 babies sharing one incubator, because they need to share the phototherapy light. Also, there is only one oxygen tank in the entire NICU, so if more than one baby needs O2, they simply split the line. As my friend Sarah put it, you only get as much oxygen as your neighbor does. Also, many of the babies are very very tiny, yet they somehow sustain themselves without additional heat or fancy machinery that we are blessed to have in the U.S. In our NICU back in Louisville, we are taught that babies generally do not learn to suck until about 35 weeks gestational age (which is therefore the first time they can eat by mouth). But these tiny little babies in the Ghanian NICU (even some 28 weekers) have already learned to drink the bottle! Survival mode I guess...

Also, the Emergency Department is extremely busy. It is a very small room where only the sickest get triage'd, and there is a period of time within which they decide if the patient is well enough to go home or should be admitted, much like the U.S. The problem is, most people here do not come to the hospital unless and until the problem is really out of hand, much UNlike the U.S. So here, by the time the patient gets admitted, he might already be blind from Vitamin A deficiency or have such severe malaria that his hemoglobin is 2.  Below is the Emergency Department waiting room. Again, it was HOT.

 The one thing I NEVER saw was an ungrateful parent, or a child who didn't smile and wave cheerfully, no matter what their circumstances. Here's a couple of new friends I made.

There's a few more but I cannot paste their faces on social media so just email me if you want to see!

 Had an ice cream break after our long morning- FanMilk tastes exactly like Dollops ice cream in India...very yummy.

 Aziz, our right hand man in picking us up and taking us places, like home and for food. Great guy.