The end of a WEEK!

I thought I'd post this picture just in case you all have forgotten what I look like, Scott took it last week during rounds. This little one's name is Asimwe Annet I think and she was just sitting on her bed and smiling as we were seeing the patient in the next bed so I couldn't help but pick her up and love on her a little. She's HIV + as is her mom, and she was in for weight gain. One day this week I caught her smiling and laughing with her mom as her mom did the African equivalent of raspberries on her belly, it was so precious to see her mom lovin' on her like that.

It's been quite a week. Last night Ashley and Sarah came over for dinner because I was needing to find ways to use up both of my portions of DMC milk for the week and so I made pasta with a white sauce with veggies and cinnamon rolls (using up the milk was a great excuse for making cinnamon rolls - which didn't really turn out as well as I'd hoped but they were pretty good for a first African attempt). The meal was really yummy if I do say so myself and the girls seemed to enjoy it too, and with a glass of red wine for each of us it was a great end to a rough week!

My mom asked for some more details on the drunken soldier story and I realized my vague illusion to that could leave several of you, especially a mother, a little worried. It wasn't really all that bad, it was just par for the course for how Wednesday was coming along. After the 32 wkr premie that wasn't breathing, shattering an ampule of Artenam while trying to draw it up and gauging my thumb in the process (think Heidi's blood dripping all over the unit while she looks for something clean and dry to stop the bleeding - and the shattering, it's what every nurse is afraid of when cracking open an ampule, but never happens - until wednesday) for a septic unconscious kid with high fevers and a stiff neck and extremities who we thought might have malaria but it turns out was probably "just" septic and died a few hours later, the HIV/AIDS ART clinic operating without Scott Myhre or Scott Will or Pat - they ran out of Septrin and there was a box at my house so I biked home on Jennifer's bike and got the super heavy box of septrin and loaded it onto the back of my bike's snazzy carrying rack (thanks Jeff!) and rode the bike very carefully (as carefully as you can on these roads) back down to the clinic trying not to topple the bike over as boda's and trucks are racing by, and then after everyone leaves I'm the last one there and decide to organize the charts for next week's clinic and just before I'm finished the drunken soldier comes into the clinic expecting to get his meds and seen by the doctor. His eyes are blood shot and glazed over, his speech isn't all that clear (especially his attempts at english) and he's not standing all that steadily either. I try to explain to him that I'm the only one here, that all I have is the charts, no medicine, no doctor, that everyone has gone and he has come too late. He persists and hands me his number, "I'm glad to see you have your number," I said, "but I have no medicine to give you and there is no doctor here to see you." "Give me my book!" he continues to insist and I'm now begining to get a little worried that his insistence is going to go a few steps past belligerence and into something a little more scary, and just then two Ugandans came from no where and started talking the guy down and telling him what was up. One was a sweeper lady who cleans the buildings in the health center, and the other was some random man but they told him he was too late, there was nothing I could do and to stop disturbing me (pretty much just what I had told him) and the guy ushered the soldier away. I have no idea how they knew what was going on because there didn't seem to be anyone around - maybe my english sticks out enough that they could hear it outside around the building and could tell I needed some help. In any case, thank God for them, I didn't have it in me after the rest of the day to be all that patient with him.

Ngonzi Christopher is still holding his own, each time that Jennifer and I have seen him since that first day he's been sleeping or without spasms at the moment.