Complicated

It's 9 pm, and we just cleaned up from a pretty delicious dinner whose preparation was interrupted by two trips to the hospital, which makes the whole cooking scene a bit more challenging. The first call was to attend the death of a very sick preemie whom I had left only an hour before, knowing he was dying. After 48 hours of an all-out effort, his vital organs were failing and we knew we were at the end of the road. I had made the always-agonizing decision to accept that he was dying, and tell the parents. Francis was in the ICU right next to his mother, whose life he saved by being born too early. She suffered from a life-threatening complication of pregnancy called "eclampsia", which can only be cured by delivery of the baby. So this doctor had to make the difficult decision of taking the baby out of the mother way too early, or risking the mother dying and leaving behind her other two children and husband. Francis' life was only about 72 hours long. But I think this was the right decision.

The second call was much more fun: the Kenyan lady who runs the "Supa Duka", the one-room everything-you-really-need small store in our village, had just delivered a strapping healthy baby boy. We are always called for C-sections, but this time there was nothing to do other than admire the lovely boy.

And while I was in the nursery, I checked on Dancun, the little boy whom I agonized about a couple of weeks ago, an HIV-exposed 28-week preemie who nearly died that night. He's now a "feeder and grower", a seemingly healthy little speck of a baby, who in spite of starting out similarly to Francis has miraculously lived. And I ran into Scott in the operating theatre, who had just finished his fourth or fifth surgery for the day, a woman whose ectopic pregnancy had ruptured her fallopian tube spilling two litres of blood into her abdomen. Thankfully her life was saved.

Which was a nice end to three solid days of nonstop work. Well, not exactly end, but at least it's in sight tomorrow morning.

Let's see, the last couple of days included a little boy with an rare congenital syndrome called Pierre-Robin, the usual parade of malnourished marginal toddlers and their desperate mothers, another boy with meningitis, preemies, two kids with severe heart lesions, a girl with damaged kidneys after an infection, the amazingly improved and nearly-healed baby born with part of his intestines missing as well as the one who had hemorrhages in both lungs, quick consults for rashes including chicken pox and fungal infections. And most distressingly, an 8 year old deeply jaundiced with a liver mass that turns out to be lymphoma, a cancer that could potentially be treatable. Only we need to get him to a hospital with an oncologist and chemotherapy. Which requires a lot of money. Which his Maasai father thinks he can manage by selling off his cows. Meanwhile we are starting chemotherapy at Kijabe and hoping we can keep him alive long enough for the cow market to come through.

The sheer breadth of pathology on this service always surprises me. One can spend all day, non-stop, from bed to bed, to ICU, to nursery, to the clinic or the emergency room, conferences and meetings, and then back around to all those places again, without a moment of down time. Yet the doctors in Kenya have threatened to strike on Monday, Dec 5. Meaning a barely-survivable day could get lots worse. Kijabe hospital without any functioning Kenyan doctors is unimaginable.

When a patient dies, the nurses use their own creative verb, saying "he complicated". It's an interesting take on death, as a complication of life, or of their disease. Or does it mean that the patient has made our life or our job more complicated? Difficult, confusing, complex, interrelated, entangled. Not the ending we all planned. Life as a doctor here is just that, complicated. The clues to a disease are often obscure, the labs unreliable, the history vague. Understanding the thoughts of the parents who come looking for an easy fix adds another layer of complication. And sorting through all of those layers with the pressure of time and people waiting complicates things further.

Hoping that no more patients complicate tonight.