Starting a blog is easy. To keep it alive is more difficult as everything becomes daily routines and nothing surprises you anymore.
One morning an old lady is sitting outside the operating theater in the crowd of patients waiting for surgery. What is she hiding under the clothing?
A plastic bag covering her right hand
She is one of the many victims of burn injuries we are presented with. In her case a neglected 3’d degree burn of the right hand – necrotic and severely infected - out of reach for salvage.
A fast amputation – actually an exarticulation – solves her problem easily. It was done in Axillary block as daycare surgery.
Otherwise burn cases are a group of patients which puts great strain on our hospital. To treat the often widespread and deep burns needs resources which we simple do not have. We have to rely on old fashioned ways of treating. Early excision and skin grafting is out of the question due to lack of resources. Usually we have to wait for the burn crusts to separate spontaneously and graft on the granulations. Even that technique often excides our capacity.
A few years ago the first burn unit in Ethiopia opened in Yekatit 12 Hospital - a government hospital in Addis Abeba. It serves the whole country with 80 million inhabitants so believe me they have enough patients. I wish we could refer our cases to that department, but none of our patients can go. It is far beyond their financial capacity and imagination. For them to be referred to FinFine – as Addis Abeba is called in afaan oromo – would be for a westerner to go to another solar system, in cost and efforts.
By the way we are running out of blades for the dermatome and the skin graft knives cannot be found in the country at the time.
The typical burn patients are females with untreated or not well adjusted epilepsy. While cooking over open fire they have an epileptic fit, fall unconsciously into the fire and remain there until found and rescued.
The concept of “life time” treatment doesn’t exist and sooner or later the patients stop the medication. It may take hours of walking to reach the nearest pharmacy and the drugs might not even be available. If they are the cost of the medication may be too much for a poor family.
Once we succeeded after a long time and a lot of efforts to heal some severe burns in a young epileptic girl only to have her back some months later with even more widespread burns.
Children are also a common victim, playing and falling into the open fire.
This handful of burn cases are what we presently have admitted in the hospital.
Starting a blog is easy. To keep it alive is more difficult as everything becomes daily routines and nothing surprises you anymore.
One morning an old lady is sitting outside the operating theater in the crowd of patients waiting for surgery. What is she hiding under the clothing?
A plastic bag covering her right hand
She is one of the many victims of burn injuries we are presented with. In her case a neglected 3’d degree burn of the right hand – necrotic and severely infected - out of reach for salvage.
A fast amputation – actually an exarticulation – solves her problem easily. It was done in Axillary block as daycare surgery.
Otherwise burn cases are a group of patients which puts great strain on our hospital. To treat the often widespread and deep burns needs resources which we simple do not have. We have to rely on old fashioned ways of treating. Early excision and skin grafting is out of the question due to lack of resources. Usually we have to wait for the burn crusts to separate spontaneously and graft on the granulations. Even that technique often excides our capacity.
A few years ago the first burn unit in Ethiopia opened in Yekatit 12 Hospital - a government hospital in Addis Abeba. It serves the whole country with 80 million inhabitants so believe me they have enough patients. I wish we could refer our cases to that department, but none of our patients can go. It is far beyond their financial capacity and imagination. For them to be referred to FinFine – as Addis Abeba is called in afaan oromo – would be for a westerner to go to another solar system, in cost and efforts.
By the way we are running out of blades for the dermatome and the skin graft knives cannot be found in the country at the time.
The typical burn patients are females with untreated or not well adjusted epilepsy. While cooking over open fire they have an epileptic fit, fall unconsciously into the fire and remain there until found and rescued.
The concept of “life time” treatment doesn’t exist and sooner or later the patients stop the medication. It may take hours of walking to reach the nearest pharmacy and the drugs might not even be available. If they are the cost of the medication may be too much for a poor family.
Once we succeeded after a long time and a lot of efforts to heal some severe burns in a young epileptic girl only to have her back some months later with even more widespread burns.
Children are also a common victim, playing and falling into the open fire.
This handful of burn cases are what we presently have admitted in the hospital.