January in the AFM Hospital

Screenings

Our screening team spent this last week in a remote village in Madagascar looking for patients in need of surgery. They had 3 screening days and saw on average 450 patients each day. I’m not sure of the exact number but they gave out between 200 and 300 patient cards to come to the ship for a surgeon screening and that was enough to fill the rest of our surgery schedule this outreach.  Big praise! With our quick arrival to Madagascar in November and short prep time we’ve pretty much been going week to week with our surgery schedule. In fact, this last week we gave surgery spaces to the last of our plastics waiting list. It’s always nice to have a waiting list for our specialties so that when we have to cancel patients for various reasons, or a patient doesn’t show up, we have someone on standby we can replace them with. But we just haven’t had that luxury this year.

Anyway, a little girl came to the village screening with a fresh burn covering her chest and neck. It was a scalding burn that happened in September and although her mom tried to keep it clean and her baby comfortable, the open wound of course got infected and is still fresh, raw, and painful. We normally wouldn’t take patients with fresh burns on the ship. Open wounds typically mean infection here and when you have a ward of 20 patients we just can’t risk that spread. However, this girl was in so much pain and just touched our hearts so much. We were able to say yes with some extra wound protocols in place and MAF flew her to the ship the next day.  Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) is a Christian organization that we’ve partnered with here in Madagascar and they have made our jobs so much easier! They are able to fly into remote areas that would take days to reach by car and have been flying our screening team around the country all outreach.  The little girl is comfortable in the hospital now and awaiting further medical treatment in the following weeks.

I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the patients they found in the coming weeks as they arrive for more assessments.