Thanksgiving in Ghana - Part 1 - Saving a Life

This week, many of my thoughts have been with my friends and family who have, no doubt, been enjoying a short work week and a bountiful amount of food and football. Each of us has been so blessed to have so much love, opportunity and comfort in our lives. I have never been one for guilt or gloom, so I have never been the kind of person to try to make others feel badly for what they have because others do without. Sometimes, though, a reminder of just how much we Americans have to be appreciative of is a helpful thing. We just finished Week 4 in Ghana. I'm half a week from being halfway home, but I have been humbly grateful for every day I've had here, and the opportunity the three of us (Jake from Chicago, Deb from Alabama and myself) have had to make an impact on lives here, including our own. Our week started off with a tough morning. Tuesday, Godson, a boy who is about 19 years old (the same age as my oldest son) was rushed to the clinic. He was convulsing and rigid when he came. A fisherman, he'd been stung by the barb of a small fish that looks very similar to a catfish, and he was having an anaphalactic reaction. He was struggling to breathe and his swollen airway was visible through his neck. Deb had taken a moment to go back to our hut for more supplies and returned to find the chaos. The young man was writhing in pain, holding his chest and gasping for air. Deb thought quickly; she'd brought an Epi-pen for her own personal use, so she pulled it out and administered the shot of epinephrine into his leg after she removed the barb from his finger. As his seizure released a short time later, she got a large dose of Benadryl down his throat. The feeling of being in a life-or-death situation with little or no resources - no hospital, lack of drugs, and a lack of understanding about what was even going on by people around us - is so hard to describe. It's the feeling of being completely helpless when so much is at stake. Jake rode the clinic bicycle back to the hut to get a scalpal, which, until that point, we thought would only be handy to peel oranges or remove splinters. I was there for lunch, so I ran back to the clinic with him to find Godson thrashing on a chair, Deb standing next to him holding his head and upper body still as much as possible. He was trying to cry and talk and yell, but he didn't have enough air to do any of those things. "This boy's about to die," Deb told me. The look on her face told me she meant it. Jake and I rallied people around us to locate a boat to get him to the hospital in Kete Krachi. Even with a motor, it would take at least 45 minutes to get him there. The people around us did not seem to understand the enormity of the situation. They had seen people get stung by the fish before, but had never seen anyone die from it. "He would have been the first," Deb later told me. He did appear to be getting better. He was still moaning, but could stand and walk with a wobble, but we didn't know if he'd had enough antihistamine to keep the reaction from getting worse again. We walked Godson down to the lake, but he was adamant that he needed to perform a short ceremony, pouring alcohol on the ground to please his dead mother so that she would help him through, before he left. Understanding how important this was to him and to the rest of the village, he was led back up the village to his hut, where he wheezed and gasped for air while he performed the ritual. He was then walked back down to the lake, where a fishing boat had arrived. Jake, Deb and Godson boarded the leaky canoe, along with a couple of other people from the village, and headed toward Krachi ... first stopping so that the fishermen could drop off their fish at another lakeside stop. The sense of "emergency" in emergency medicine here is not exactly urgent. A few minutes into their trip, Godson started to recover quite a bit. Of course, we believe the Benadryl he'd been given orally kicked in, but the village believes it was his dead mother that saved him. In any case, he made it, and we know that, if Deb had not been here with her Epi-pen, there would have been a much different outcome. (Continued in next blog post) Amanda Christmann Larson is director of Compassionate Journeys, a volunteer organization dedicated to providing opportunities for deeply impoverished people and trafficked children in Ghana, West Africa. She lives in Anthem, Arizona and is a regular contributor to ImagesAZ. For more information, visit www.compassionatejourneys.com and www.babesblockingtraffic.com.