Post op
day #1, she started vomiting up blood and had a bleed of her GI tract. Post op day #2 she was struggling to breathe
and was found to be significantly short of oxygen due to pneumonia. Jim went away for the weekend and left me in
charge of her care. She seemed to be
doing ok on postop day #3, but on postop day #4 she developed another
complication. Her abdomen became
swollen, and her dressing from the surgery was soaked in blood. An ultrasound showed lots of free fluid
throughout her abdomen and I was worried she was bleeding inside from the
surgery. Thankfully her blood level was
stable, but she was still really sick.
I got her
through the weekend and was happy to hand her back off to Jim on Monday. Thankfully, she continued to get better and
better each day and went home without further complications. I had forgotten about her, but this week Jim
came and told me I needed to see a patient in his exam room. Sina was back for followup, and was looking
great. It was hard to recognize her as
the same patient who had almost died a few weeks ago following surgery.
We don't
have clothing stores like you think of in the US here in PNG. Most everyone buys there clothes from people
at the market. There are just piles of
clothes or clothes hung up that you can buy for a few kina. No one really knows what the clothes mean or
represent, they just buy them because they are cheap and so they fill a
need. Most of the clothes come from
Australia, so you never know what you might find on someone's shirt each
day. When Jim called me in to see Sina,
he also wanted to show me her sweatshirt.
It was a DO sweatshirt, which is pretty rare in the US, much less
PNG. I am sure no one over here even
knows what a DO is, much less an MD (they don't have that designation either
for their doctors).
Thankfully,
Sina is doing well. Jim and I got to
pray for her before she left. It is
always good to have a happy ending.
