emiline

It's late in the evening on Friday. Unless I'm badly wrong, the patients downstairs are tucked in their beds, sleeping the night away. All except Emiline; she's going to sleep in her own bed tonight.

Emiline was the first. The first patient to be carried through the doors of Operating Room Three this outreach. Her left leg was twisted, and her grandma wasn't shy in praying for her healing. She did more than pray, though. Despite Emiline's classic five year-old Yovophobia (Yovophobia: noun. An intense, often irrational fear of white people. Not limited to nursing staff, although these tend to be the scariest.), her grandma brought her to the ship. They waited in the hot sun outside the admissions tent on Wednesday while all around them we pretended to evacuate the hospital. (This commotion, unfortunately, did nothing to allay little Emiline's fears.) They made their way down to the wards while Emiline staunchly refused to smile or even acknowledge the countless attempts at friendship; she wanted nothing to do with the scary Yovos.

Unfortunately for her, the Yovos weren't going anywhere. In fact, one of them (potentially a very tall, Canadian-American one) wrapped her up in a blanket and carted her off to the operating room, handing her over to a bunch of strangers wearing masks while a camera crew filmed the whole thing. (I'm getting to that, I promise.)

Afterwards, things weren't much better. Emiline came back from the operating room with a cast on her little left leg. We propped her up in bed like a tiny queen, making sure she was getting her medicines for pain, making sure stickers were always close at hand, making sure someone was always there to comfort her, but she just stared at us, stoic and unsmiling.

This morning, all of that love paid off. I was walking past her bed in the corner when I saw a flash of red. I peeked over to see Emiline hiding behind a piece of construction paper, the product of the latest attempt at friend-making on the part of her nurse. I gently tickled the toes sticking out the end of her new, white cast and was rewarded with the crinkle of a grin in the corner of her mouth. I tickled her again, and a tiny giggle escaped from behind the paper. We were finally friends.

Which is why it was bittersweet to round with the surgeons and realize that Emiline would be another first; the first patient discharged this outreach. Everything went perfectly with her surgery. Her bones are straight, her pain is almost gone, and she has a little orange card telling her when to come back and see us.

Emiline is sleeping in her own bed tonight, having survived her time with the Yovos, the first patient to be won over by love poured out.



Now, if you want to see Emiline, instead of just reading about her, there's a good chance that she'll appear on a Discovery Channel Canada show called Mighty Ships, airing sometime in April or May, I believe. There was a crew from the show here for the past month, filming the sail and the setup and everything that goes on on this crazy ship, and we're all going to be on TV! At least that's what I figure the snazzy hat they left me is all about.

The guys said I'll be on the show, but I'm not sure what part of the footage they shot of me is going actually make the cut. This may or may not be because I spent most of the time laughing / looking the wrong way / making faces / forgetting what question they had just asked me / goofing off. Which, really, is par for the course for me, so they'd better just go ahead and leave it all in.

We're all excited about how this is going to turn out; I'll keep you posted as I know more details.