night

I feel like it's been forever since I have written. Right now I'm in the middle of my third night in a row, and I've got three more after this one. I was called in unexpectedly last night and the one before, so I worked both on less than two hours of sleep; this week has been spent in the resulting stupor.

Since the wards opened, it's been one emergency after another. When really sick patients go to be seen at hospitals in Monrovia, they'll sometimes refer them to the ship. Which means that, on any given day, we have no idea who is going to get carried up our gangway.

A few nights ago, it was Sadie. He's four, with little pink sandals waiting hopefully at the end of his bed. Sadie is about as sick as you can be. He has Burkitt’s Lymphoma, a condition which Dr. Mark (a cancer surgeon on board at the moment) calls 'eminently curable.'

If he were an American four-year-old, he would have seen a doctor when his face started swelling a month ago. He would have been diagnosed, he would have gotten chemo and he almost certainly would have been cured. But instead he's lying so still (far too still for four years old), bound to his bed by the bouquet of tubes and wires sprouting from his small body. I think I'm echoing the hearts of everyone involved in caring for Sadie when I just want to scream: your birthplace shouldn't be a death sentence.

I look at little Sadie and I am undone. It's the same heavy, aching feeling that I used to get back home when little ones came in so sick. Except this could have been prevented. If only Sadie could have seen a doctor. A doctor who had the right diagnostic equipment and the right knowledge and the right medicines. But Sadie lives in Liberia, where there is something like one doctor for every hundred thousand people. Liberia, where the lights in the capital city have yet to be turned back on after the brutal civil war. Liberia, where the government spends less than five dollars a year per person on healthcare.

How can we hope to make a difference?