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So there seems to be a trend in injuries. Some people say that medical things come in three’s. To me this is superstitious, and I do not believe it. But last week we worked on the man with an epidural hematoma. I.e. burr hole with much nibbling leaving a larger hole and a drain.
The following day a boy came in who had been hit by a soccer ball on the side of the head and was unconscious, agitated, and only moving one side of his body. God healed him, for today, one week later, he was laughing, playing, talking and moving all extremities. This brings us to last night:
Many things have been going on and I have had a hard time going to sleep at night this last week. I lay there and mull over the things I need to do or try to solve some of the day’s problems. Audrey tells me to stop moving. She says I’m thrashing about in bed. So I turn over and try to go to sleep again. I toss and turn for a while then I hear a knock at the door. I feel groggy like I must have just fallen asleep. It’s midnight. Mbitomou tells me that there is a ten year old girl with a head injury she sustained after falling from a tree, and that he hesitates to even bother me as she has brain matter all over her head. She fell during the day and lives in a village very far away. He thinks she has broken her skull in a large area. So he takes me to the hospital on his motorcycle. This gives me a minute to think of what I will do on physical exam. She is laying on a gurney, the right side of her head rather flat. She has a skin wound about 5cm long with brain ma
tter bulging from it and smeared across her black kinky hair. She flops back and forth using only her right arm. She doesn’t respond to sounds and doesn’t say anything. Her pupils are both reactive and small. I palpate her head and I feel what I think is a large depression; blood is coming from her nose. The family says she has lost a lot of blood, and she looks pale. I describe to the family my findings, and tell them her only chance is to operate on her, and that her chance is small. The father says he has no money. I reinforce that this is necessary for a small chance of helping her. He agrees to surgery saying that he brought her all the way here to see if we could help her.
In the operating room I call Audrey and Ganava. After shaving her head and prepping it, I incise in a huge semicircle. I see many fragments of skull, brain and dura all in different levels. The skull has been fractured in maybe 7 pieces. The fragments sit at strange angles to each other. I free up the dura from beneath a few and raise out some large pieces. The dura is torn with blue brain matter below with pieces of skull down in it. I debreed the material from the brain. I see an area of subdural hematoma, so I open the dura over that to evacuate it. I repair the dura. Next I use some periosteum to create a dural patch. It seemed more accessible than fascia lata, though I had prepped the leg. One fracture went behind the ear and down to the base of the skull. Blood started welling up from this area. Nothing seemed to stop it and I couldn’t get under the brain enough to find it. So I elevated the head of the bed and it subsided, Praise God! I set the bone fra
gments back in place and sutured the skin closed. She stayed stable throughout the case regardless of her condition.
Before leaving work this evening, she is moving her right arm slightly. Pupils are still reactive. I’m praying for a miracle. Please pray with me, for her. Her name is Mounagui. Greg

It has been a while since I’ve written. We have been quite busy. The rains came for a couple weeks and now it has not rained for a month again. No one is planting yet. we look forward to being home and since January we have not found a physician to cover the hospital during our absence. God has provided every year. Last year it was 5 days before leaving. I’m sure he will provide again. We were hoping to have peaceful sleep, the Friday night. The power is out because 9 power poles blew over on Thursday. I suspect we will be out for more than a week. So I was getting ready for bed. Where to sleep. It’s 94 degrees inside. A little breeze near the kitchen table, the bed is to hot, the trampoline outside is a good spot but I don’t feel like mosquito repellent tonight. So I lay a sheet on the concrete floor and sleep for about an hour. I am awakened by itching and buzzing around my ears, Mosquitos! So I go for the bed. I take a bucket bath (no power = no running w
ater) to cool off and don’t even dry off. I just drip to bed and evaporate while laying there. I’ve just fallen to sleep when there is a knock at the window. There is a problem at maternity. Jonas is calling. I slowly walk into the hospital and wake up enough to talk to Jonas. A woman has been in labor since yesterday but is not progressing. I do a vaginal exam and get meconium on the gloves. The baby is stressed. i tell the father that we need to do a C-section, and surprisingly he directly agrees with whatever I think is best. I go and start the generator and head to the OR. I do a c-section and pull out a screaming baby. Praise God, the last two were still-born. It’s very frustrating to do a c-section and know the baby is dead. I finish up her surgery. I slowly go home as to not be my muscles hot. I take a shower and drip to bed.

An hour later the hospital guard is at the window. This time it is someone who was drunk and got hit in the head. He had done Ok and then became unconscious. He is laying on the ER bed wet and smelling of urine and bili-bili (millet wine). I rub his sternum to arouse him and he doesn’t really do anything. Checking his pupils demonstrates that the one is working fine but the one on the side where he was hit is dilated and non-reactive. He needs a neurosurgeon. Let’s see, the nearest one is in Yaounde aprox. 1000 miles away. You may recall Shanksteps #73 that Audrey wrote about my job description. Well, let’s add one more- Neurosurgeon. Dr. Gary Marais had brought us out a drill and a few instruments that could be used for a burr hole. So I took these with me to the OR. Reviewed cranial anatomy, sliced open the scalp, dissected up the periosteum. And found a hole punched in the skull with blood clots bulging from it. As I evacuated the hematoma, he seemed to react
more. We put him more asleep. I found he had an epidural hematoma. I evacuated this. Picked pieces of bone from his brain matter and then closed the dura. But he kept bleeding. I tied off the meningeal artery, where it was bleeding and then held pressure 20 min. I left a drain and at the end of surgery his eye was reactive again. Praise God he is still alive. I am anxious to see the end result. There is never a dull moment in the mission field. I pray that God heal this man and that he be able to go home without deficits. Thank you for lifting them up in prayer too. Greg

Shanksteps #120

The Cameroons

If someone from the Northeast (New York for example) were to travel to New Mexico for the first time, they would have their eyes opened to a completely different climate, landscape, food choice, and people-group. They may feel as if they traveled to a different country altogether.

I was asked by a group from Loma Linda to help out with a Health Fair in Buea, Cameroon. All I knew about Buea was that we had a struggling hospital there, and that it was very far from Koza. To get to Buea from Koza, one must take a motorcycle to Mokolo (1 hour+), a bush taxi to Maroua (1 hr), a bus to Ngoundare (7 hours), a train to Yaounde (15-30 hours depending on derailments…this trip took 15hrs in seats), a share taxi to the bus station (20 min normally, but 2 hours when the Pope is visiting Yaounde…) and a bus to Buea (4 ½ hrs). With all the waiting and haggling, it takes longer to get from Koza to Buea than from Los Angeles to Buea. Anyhow, I agreed to help with the Health Fair, but dreaded the trip. Greg was asked to come to Buea also for a one-day AHI meeting with Dr Hart, so we were able to travel together.

We were told that the best bus company to take from Yaounde to Buea was Musango Voyage. It claims to be a Christian company, and had a bus non-stop to the center of Buea. Just as we were leaving Yaounde, a young man asked if anyone would like to pray for the trip, and a lady in the back agreed. (Even been on a “prayerful” bus?). Well, this started a discussion (more like a small riot) as to whether the Bible says it is acceptable for women to pray in public. The next thing that happened is that this same young man started promoting herbal remedies like ginseng and other “medicinal” remedies. It was kind of like an info-mercial; We were a captive audience. At the first toll booth, he got off to try to sell to another bus going back to Yaounde. When we arrived in Buea, I was amazed by so many things: Everyone had on “western” clothing. The people spoke English. There were huge plantations for bananas, palms, rubber trees, and coconuts. There were fruits and vegetables available everywhere. There were churches everywhere. The climate was perfect: slightly humid, but not very hot. When we started the Health Fair I noticed something else strikingly different from Koza: the people were not only literate, but highly educated. The diseases were distinctly “western” like diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. The questions were about mammograms, PAP smears, and weight loss. We were not asked once for money or gifts. For the students from Loma Linda who were putting on the health fair, it felt like they had just entered a developing country, with poverty, inconsistent electricity, water only every other day, and no supermarkets. For Greg and me it felt like we had just arrived in Canaan – a land flowing with milk and honey.

Greg’s meeting on Sunday afternoon went well. We were able to visit with Dr Hart and his wife, Judy for a brief time before they left to visit Nigeria.   Greg decided to stay in Buea to help with the Health Fair. It was a good thing he did, because most of the other doctors they had planned on to help never showed up. Greg and I saw an average of 50 patients a day for free. The LLU students taught the community about oral hygiene, nutrition, HIV, and family planning. We were all exhausted by the time the sun went down each night. On Friday, the 27, Greg took me to the beach for my birthday.  We found a hotel on the beach to stay at that night. It turned out that this hotel was like a resort, complete with a black volcanic beach, a fresh spring water swimming pond, tennis, basketball and volleyball courts, sea kayaks for rent, horses for hire to ride down the beach, or up the volcanic mountain, a restaurant on the beach, a night club, and a very professional staff, (not to mention hot running water and electricity 100% of the time). It was like paradise for us. We have been told that most of western Cameroon (especially the Anglophone part) is like this. It has been amazing to us to see the differences among the different provinces; from north to south, from east to west, and French to English.

I am writing this from a sleeper car. We were fortunate to be able to get a two spots in a 2-person sleeper car for the return trip. I slept almost the whole 17 hour trip and it has been very pleasant. To get back to Koza, we still have to take a bus (mini-van, 5 people in 4 seats) for 7 hours to Maroua, pick up medications in Maroua, and head back to Koza and its 105-110 degree temperatures. Our mini-vacation is over, but we are both recharged for the work that awaits us. This trip has opened our eyes to the differences among people groups in this country, and the potential difference that we can make in the North with education and the love of God. Please pray for the hospital that is just starting in Buea (it is currently just a clinic), and for the American missionary doctor that will be heading out there this summer to stay. Please pray for the people of Koza, that they will desire further education, and will feel the love of God and turn from their previous ways. Thank you for your support, love and prayers.

In His Grip, Audrey