1.8.09

We held our most recent medical camp in a social club attached to a temple. The temple’s two human-size female goddesses faced a cow pattie-covered wall across the narrow street. The wall guarded the jute mill of famed violence. Here is a sequence of events from the camp:

For only the second time since arriving, we were all told to stop working at once in order to examine a particular patient. It was a ten month-old girl with encephalocele. Her brain was squeezing out of a gap in her skull, forming a bulge the size of a golf ball just above her forehead. This is the case we were prepared for; we’re funding the child’s surgery and recovery costs. Minutes after we sat back at our stations, puja began just feet behind me. Attuned to the bells and unintelligible chants, I questioned and examined a diabetic and hypertensive woman that had stopped taking her medication without explanation. She just wanted her blood pressure checked. After the prayer stopped, I examined an 88 year-old man with extreme protein-calorie malnutrition. He weighed 60 lbs. with no meat on his arms, legs, or chest. Marasmus, especially on his arms, made me want to vomit and/or cry more than any other bodily sign I’ve seen. (I’ve learned that I can control those reactions by getting back into my healthy body and pulling its parts together.) He also was in severe respiratory distress, had no front teeth, was blind in one eye, and had glasses so dirty that I don’t believe he could see out of the other.

I saw another malnourished man later. He was more capable of communicating with us and repeatedly asked me if he was going to be okay. (He was, except for that whole weighing only 75 lbs. part.) When I got on my knees and touched his feet for the PMS exam, he became quite emotional and repeatedly bowed to me. I love forming a doctor-patient relationship, even if it’s unintentional and I’m not a doctor.

Edit: The scans on the child revealed that it was not encephalocele but rather meningocele. That's good news.