Sad Stories and Soap Boxes

My last day working in the hospital, I was watching Little One paint a flower as Missy napped in Her car seat.  Suddenly there was a flurry of footsteps and shawls. Strangers speaking urgent words I couldn’t understand ushered me into a room down the hall.  There was a bed like the others, with two men in white coats bent over it intensely.  Behind them was a woman.  A mother, holding the end of her scarf over her mouth.  Her eyes were wide and terrified, slowly leaking tears.  The people who had brought me gesticulated wildly towards the child on the bed, the exact same age as my youngest daughter. 

Sometimes.  There is this stereotype of a Foreigner.  This concept that, coming from one of these nations where you have everything and can do anything, that you are everything-  a doctor, a scientist, an expert.  A miracle worker? 

They were begging me to save her. 

Of course, I couldn’t.  I couldn’t do anything more than they could- hold their hands and say I was sorry… and watch her die. 

I have seen people die. But not a child.  It isn’t the same.   

And while I wasn't there to witness the moment it claimed them, having seen enough of death I surely recognized its telltale signs on the bodies of other children there.  It was haunting to know that I could do nothing to chase it away.   
There was a lot during our time at the hospital that was hard to work through. 
Coming from a public health background, it was excruciating to see so many things, some big and some simple, that fly in the face of what I have been taught is the “best practice” for hospital care.  The bathrooms were intolerable.  The first time one my kids had to pee, a nurse took us down three flights of stairs, across a courtyard and down a long hallway to a small clean-ish room, where they used a fresh stainless-steel bowl and washed hands from water streaming out of a leaking pipe.  After that they just peed in an empty paint can.  My kids are troupers, people.  It was far better than what the patients are stuck with.  It was hard to know that.
It was hard to see children suffering, sometimes without access to pain medicines.  It was hard to see the exhaustion and desperation of the parents and families.  One grandmother cried out to us from beneath a crib. Enclosed in the prison-like bars of a broken bed railing, She begged us to take care of her granddaughter.  I’m sick myself, I’m dying too, she sobbed.  Who will take care of her?  What will we do? 

I think I could drown in the sadness of some of the things I witnessed in that hospital.   

But it would be selfish to allow myself to drown on other people’s tears.   It wouldn’t help them, it wouldn’t change a thing.  So instead, I kept painting. 

And now, I want to retell those hard things because they are real, and they happened, and they are happening right now.  Maybe someone will read and decide to help.  Or to keep doing what they do now- as a doctor, a nurse, a janitor, a taxpayer- to keep that kind of hell from creeping into places where it has been largely weeded out.  

Or to realize how much we have here, and maybe squander it less.  Most of us are surrounded by clean, nutritious, FDA-inspected food we can afford to buy.  Yet we choose to feed our children products, junk that will just kill them later.  We have unlimited, purified water gushing from multiple taps in our homes.  We waste it without a thought; we fill the landfills with plastic bottles. We have access to these miraculous, lifesaving medicines and we forgo them because we heard somewhere there might be side effects.  To each his own (really), but listen, any parent who chooses not to vaccinate their child has never seen one dying of pertussis or tetanus.  

Indeed one of the only reasons I could even consider bringing my children into an environment like that was knowing that they carried invisible shields with them.  It was amazing to see these sick, sick little ones just on the other side of the glass, and know that for the price of a few needle pricks my own Littles will never have to carry those burdens.  Never.  

Of course there aren't magic-shield shots for everything, and so the Littles, especially Missy, were only allowed to play with many of the patients through the windows in the walls between rooms.  But some of the children were not contagiously ill, and so the Littles were able to make some friends.  Which they surely did.  But that's another story.