Visitors

Actually that is a stretch but as close as I could come to summing up a bit of how I feel but you can probably scratch the "well informed" part and still catch the drift. 

I haven't ran away from home yet but it has been quite challenging since I last wrote although I have been writing but just not posting.  Some time back I wrote a blog post back about a very interesting video that was shown to us at our orientation in DC. It was a TED talk that was done by an Italian gentleman who worked in Africa called, "Shut up and Listen" or something close to that. Our country director of SEED also brought it when they were doing a type of orientation here in Lira and advised me to watch it, some months back. I told him not only had I watched it but also shared it with many people and that I had posted it on my blog and FB. I wish that it was required watching for many more people not just those of us on the ground, so to speak, I certainly felt as though I have been pretty close to the ground the past few days.

However, as a pick me up I was blessed that I had my houseguests Janet and Genevieve who did come over for their visit with the GHSP experts who came in. I was overjoyed to have them and they were a breath of much needed fresh air. I was so happy to have them stay with me and we had a great time. They are both volunteers who started in DC with me and live about a 6 hour journey away. Common sense, and good, good people, what more do you need? I would happily share my house with either one of them on a permanent basis any day and I made it through some tough times with their support. Yeah for Nurses supporting Nurses because I was starting to feel like Jon Snow’s older sister.

Young Janet who is staying with me has had her pic line removed and is doing well now and loved our house guests and is starting to bring sunshine back into my life. It also turned out since I last wrote that not only did she have Typhoid, but also Malaria. Can’t blame the Bronco’s for that can we? I continue to develop my own special relationship with my students and have some great stories to share about them, I kept hearing from previous volunteers that the students are what will keep me sane, the students are why I will stay, the students are what it is all about, oh how true that is and I had no idea how far that circle might extend because truly they are what it is all about. They are tasked with things that nurses in the US would be pretty astounded by but much more to say on that when I feel a bit more comfortable. Some things I just can’t write about and frequently less truly is more.

Janet with Malaria and Typhoid

My idea to have them work on their assessments and then to have one person from each of their ten different ward assignments give a presentation on Friday turned out very well for them and for me and for our patients. Not just my idea to have them do it, but the fact that it gave me a chance to really get to know more about what they are all doing since spending time each of them on the wards is quite challenging due to the number of patients and 40 students. These students gave the most outstanding presentations and shared many interesting, informative and educated stories about their patients as well as the situation here on the ground, a real Shut Up and Listen experience in a very practical manner.

Sadly with our visitors on Tuesday the class couldn’t show their particular brand of shine and we were back to the planning stage of The Scientific Process of Nursing. The good news is that the staff, the Ugandan Council of Nursing, most BSN grads from the US and other countries as well as Janet and Genevieve do know exactly what the class is. It is a close relative to the Fundamentals of Nursing but it is not Med Surg, and it is not F of Nursing. It was developed, tested and tried as a class that helps nurses learn to plan, to implement, to make care plans and incorporated into nursing programs by some one at a much more senior level then me and certainly not just in Uganda.  When we walked out of our class I was asked why we didn’t have a “Nursing class” or I think why was I teaching “Planning” to this level of students. Reasonable question if one just forgets the purpose of the class!    

My students doing group work 

I’ve spent so much time and money researching this class I am teaching and even sat in and took classes on my own and watched recorded presentations of how others are teaching this classes and researched the syllabus from other Universities, purchased and brought books on it as well as looking at how it is incorporated in Uganda by their nursing council I almost forget that I had to Google S of P of Nursing when I read it on my “terms of reference” or job description.  My students gave the guests a warm welcome and I wish that others could have seen their presentations last week, the amount of time that they spend on their assessments and the level of hard work they are putting in to learning what is expected from this class is impressive. I wish that there had been enough time for others to have come to see these students for the remarkably talented group they are with students who are already nurses who have come back to earn their Bachelors to those just coming out of A-level, they have challenges to struggle with, one small challenge is that I don’t run the hospital, and neither do they, and neither does Lira University. They have students from four other places who are all training on the same wards with them. The lack of medical equipment is something I hope I can sort out. The fact that they don’t have a thermometer frustrates me so why get into the fact that there is only one per every two or three wards.

Genevieve and her husband Craig at our swearing in. I tease her that she looks like a Clark kid or grandkid! 

Today when we were back at the hospital. I had stopped in to see the little boy who is in heart failure that “D” boy I wrote about.  On Monday he was looking better, today he was in very bad condition and is struggling for every breath.  There also is no oxygen and the head of the bed was back down.  We had already been asked to leave one ward as they were attempting to make rounds and I like to work with in the framework of the hospital. I sat through a four hour meeting where the rules were clearly laid out by the hospital administrator and other staff and therefore I am attempting to have the very best experience for the students while staying within the structure of the hospital. That in it self is a tremendous challenge for the Senior staff, how well I remember guests and visiting nursing student from IMH India.  On our rounds today we met a 24 year old patient who is in very terrible condition (TB and Malaria) that is from a tribe where cannibalism is still practiced. One of our students who is from the same region of Eastern Uganda helped explain that they only eat dead people. So relax friends and family!

Life in Lira can hopefully get back to Life in Lira and I look forward to the staff meeting with the University tomorrow and then being with my students again. They already have impressed me with their ability to sift through what exactly The Scientific Process of Nursing is and are becoming familiar with some of our terminology. For those who are not familiar with the process this is the cycle. We startec classes with an overall view and then are moving around to planning. I work some part in on Assessment in every class and ultimately that will be my focus for the class. At least that is what the course was designed to teach. 

1. Oh and my students really got my fun version of the new Maslow. They studied the Hierarchy  last year so I showed this as we use Maslow in almost every lecture in the Scientific Process of Nursing class that I teach. They charge they rush to charge their phones the minute the power comes on or go down to a little cafe near the University where they have a small "battery charging station" 

They are such a bright group and just being with them again will be great on Friday as they will share more with me about their assessments and work from when we were at the hospital today. I have also requested them to do some statistical work so we will know how many cases of Malaria, TB, and Sepsis we are dealing with on the wards. I can’t be with all of them every minute and I can say that very few people on planet earth have participated in what we experienced this afternoon. Absolutely beyond horrible, can’t write about it just yet but if I have never seen a terminal patient with who I knew only had a very short time to live who I have ever in this much pain.  The fact that she is living these last hours in such agony at the age of 20 was terrible and the child she gave birth to when her uterus ruptured has also died. Enough said. I have felt very out of touch of late and what little human contact I had has been with hospitals, students and I am going to miss Janet and Genevieve every second of the next few days. If things get too rough we are going to hop into Lefty Two and go visit them although on the way home from the hospital we took it in as the tires were very low and they pulled three huge nails out of them. They kept telling me how bad my tires were and I kept thinking this is absolutely not important compared to how things are a few yards away at the hospital.