The Lassa Ward by Dr. Ross Donaldson

Author:Dr. Ross Donaldson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312377007
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

When Zuri and I later did our rounds, most of the patients simply needed another day of ribavirin treatment. This was true as well for Nini, the woman who had miscarried the day before. She had improved noticeably overnight and sat pensively in her room, gazing through a crack in the cement-covered window.

“How dee body?” I said.

“Dee body fine,” she replied.

Nini’s symptoms were a dramatic turnaround from the previous day. The expulsion of her fetus and placenta, the likely location of most of the virus, probably accounted for much of her improvement. The antiviral medication we were giving her certainly was helping as well. “Tell her I think she will be fine,” I told Zuri, trying to convey my words to Nini with an encouraging smile.

We found Little Sia in the room next door, with a much less certain fate. The tide of his rash was starting to recede from the ink line I had drawn the day before, but he lay limply in his mother’s lap, barely moving.

I felt a desperate need to heal the small child, unsure if I myself could survive witnessing such an innocent death. There is something uniquely tragic about disease in one so young. Schopenhauer, an eighteenth-century German philosopher, gave the fact that children die as proof that God does not exist. Looking down at Sia’s innocent face cradled in his mother’s arm, I realized that witnessing his illness would likely test anyone’s belief in a higher power.

Such tragedy challenges our faith in a just world. When confronting sickness in adults, we can imagine that there is some unknown reason guiding the hand of misfortune. Perhaps karma is righting unspoken transgressions. But what could a child have done to deserve such punishment? What sin, besides birth, could he or she have committed?

Somehow it seemed to me that saving Sia would begin to mitigate the guilt I felt over Binta’s death. Having so recently, and with such questionable skill, been initiated into the full responsibility of holding another person’s life in my hands, I felt a deep fear that I would again fail one of my charges.

“He’s going to get better,” I said to the child’s mother while simultaneously praying—for him, her, and me—that the words I spoke were true.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.