tears, and fire drill fun

on monday afternoon we admitted a very sick infant to the hospital. and because my background is picu, i was asked to switch up my schedule to care for him on tuesday. i was a bit nervous caring for an icu patient here even though that is what i have been doing the last 12 years. i guess b/c there are less resources here. anyways, the baby, alieu, was looking the best he'd looked since he'd been hospitalized...moving a bit more, good heart rate and blood pressure, blood sugar that was normal. and then, he just died. he was fine and then he was just gone...it took a few minutes but he was just there and then we were disconnecting everything and handing him to mom and dad to hold. the dad couldn't believe it. the mom was blaming god (although not sure if she meant allah or God). and it broke my heart. this death hit me hard. much like the first ones i dealt with early on in my career. i always cry when a family loses their child, even if it is a release for the child. but not staying teary for a few days as i did here. and i really don't know why it was so much harder here. but it was. i do ask that you would pray for his family. alieu was a twin and team picu prayed over his brother, mustapha, before he left that he would grow healthy and strong. that his family would be able to love him without bitterness at their loss. that somehow, this would be used to touch their hearts with the love of Christ.

so, on a much less somber note, we have fire drills every other week on thursday. (lucky amy got to miss one). there is always some scenario they set up and the fire team has to get fully geared up and "fight" the fire. the rest of us have to muster on the dock, medical to the left of the gangway, everyone else to the right. for those who are taking care of patients in the ward or operating rooms, we do a head count of which crew is there, how many patients and caregivers and which patients can evacuate themselves and which ones need help. well, we had 4 patients who would need evacuation. so 8 of us volunteered to go back into the "burning" ship to rescue. gerry, our irish physical therapist, mocked us saying he didn't think we girls could evacuate someone, so we strapped him to a stretcher and evacuated him out. the aft stairs that we evacuated on are pretty much straight up so he was almost hanging by the neck strap on the way up the stair. but we did it. it did take 5 of us b/c of the angle of the stair and if the ship had really been on fire, we would have all burned up while we were trying to figure out the straps to the stretcher. next time, i'll just go for piggy backing or not volunteer to rescue =) but we all had a good laugh out of it. the first pic below is one of the muster pics. the second pic is me, juan and mandy strapping gerry in. photos courtesy of a. cassidy.