"OS"

Written by Ty

My New Year's resolution is to be more disciplined about blog entries...

I have actually written several things on paper over the preceeding weeks, but have not committed them to digital format until now. Even this morning, I had to face an array of encumbrances before I could begin to write, though writing was at the top of my to do list on this holiday.

First, I was called to check on a patient at the hospital—an emergency, a young man suffering from a severe asthma attack. When I asked the nursing staff about the medication of choice for his condition, which they had thought of but not yet given, I got my least favorite response: “OS,” she said. Medical professionals in East Africa are even more in love with acronyms than we are. “OS,” means “out of stock.” To my mind this seems a superfluous abbreviation, but who am I to criticize? I am sure they have learned this behavior from Westernized teachers. I am reminded of the professors line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “My goodness, what are they teaching in schools these days?” In the end, I took some injectable steroids from my personal stock of emergency medications that I keep at the house for our own family's use. The patient now seems to be recovering.

“OS” frustrates me for obvious reasons. How can we be out of life-saving medications for extended periods of time? This is not the first time. These medications are very cheap and available only an hour's drive away. We are supposed to restock our pharmacy weekly. I am sure that we have not used up our whole supply of steroids during the last week—Christmas week, the least busy week of the year. Certainly someone administered the last dose from the pharmacy without ensuring that proper measures were taken to resupply our stock. Of course I could undertake to oversee this process myself, implementing my own system of checks and double-checks, and assess daily as to whether it was being followed, but what would that really accomplish? As soon as I am away then it won't get done. The idea to deal with this problem and the discipline to carry it out must come from the nursing staff—not from me. If I teach someone algebra, they will never learn it if I do all the problems for them. I must let them do the problems themselves. The same applies to teaching medicine. Admittedly, medical care can be high stakes. People can die if we don't make the right decisions. And sometimes those decisions have to have been made a week ahead of time. We have our challenges...

After that emergency, I had to investigate why the solar power was down, which led my computer to be dead. J's computer still has battery power, but I first had to repair the Tab key, which little W. tore off. Actually she ripped off many of the keys—all but the Tab key just clicked back in place. But the Tab key was actually broken. I also had to have a discussion with Dr. C. trying to discover why the workers we had hired to dig a cistern (a REALLY huge hole in the ground in which you could hide a school bus, which they dig with two shovels, a bucket and a rope) had run off. On one level I don't blame them...