Africa Mercy - First Day: One Nurse's Story

My friend Marilyn is in Africa serving as a nurse on the Africa Mercy. She emails me and I share her words with you. For those of you who know nothing of  Marilyn's story, the Africa Mercy is a hospital ship that travels the African coast with a crew of nurses and doctors. They come from all over to give of their time as volunteers.  

"First Day"

09-18-17

I arrived in Cameroon last night, got to my room around midnight, after

about 36 hours of travel without sleep.   I was supposed to arrive

several hours earlier, but my first flight out of Syracuse had

mechanical problems, and so they had to completely reroute me, through

Paris instead of Brussels.  Now that is one intimidating airport!  Huge,

with multiple terminals, a complicated bus system between terminals, and

poor signs.  It took a couple of hours to get from arrival gate to

departure gate.  Luckily, I had six hours to kill, so taking two hours

to find my way wasn't overly stressful.

I was up again at 5:45 AM to start my first day of work.  We have 22 day

workers (the locals that we hire to translate, teach, manage patients,

and do many of the technical tasks), so I have a lot of new names to

learn.  Dr. Glen spent most of the day still teaching the team--he is an

excellent teacher!  The day crew seem like they are all fairly strong in

English.  That will help a lot.  They also seem like cheerful workers,

enthusiastic and involved.  I think we're off to a good start.

Initially the plan was for government workers to screen for cataracts

upcountry before the ship arrived and then send them to us for surgery.

For reasons I don't know, that plan didn't work well.  That meant that

we needed to restructure our team to handle the extra work of doing the

initial screening.  So, now the eye team has been subdivided into task

groups.  One group will be responsible for the initial screening

process.  They will see hundreds of people each day, selecting those

that seem like they'd be good candidates for cataract surgery.  Those

folks will get an appointment for secondary screening at the off-ship

eye clinic.   At this appointment, the second group will test their

visual acuity (we select for the more profoundly blind) and give them a

more thorough eye exam.  If they are still good surgical candidates, we

do a variety of measurements to determine the correct lens.  When we

give them an appointment for surgery, we need to teach them of possible

complications so that they can give informed consent, and we need to

teach them what to do to prepare for surgery.  This last step of

appointments and teaching is where I will be working.

The third task group is the day-of-surgery eye room, where I have worked

in previous times.  They bring the people onto the ship, prepare them

for surgery, and then send them home after surgery with careful

instructions on what to do next.  The fourth stop for the patients is

the surgery itself--but that's the OR crew, not our team.  The next task

group of our team is the post-surgical care group.  They see the

patients the day after surgery, see any patients that need further

follow-up, and see all the patients again at six weeks for a final check

and JAG treatment (a laser treatment that pokes holes in the posterior

capsule behind the new lens, done because about 20% of all cataract

patients develop cloudiness in this membrane after surgery; the JAG

treatment prevents this.)

I think that this new organizational scheme will be an improvement over

what we've done in the past, where one clinical team handled all the

tasks that weren't done on the day of surgery itself.  Divide and

conquer--I think it will reduce the stress and chaos of one team trying

to do too many tasks at once.

We don't have internet at the team house where I live off ship, so my

access to internet may be sporadic--free time on the ship will probably

be random and scarce once we actually get underway with secondary

screening in the clinic.  I'll write when I can.

Keep us in your prayers as we gear up to do 2200 surgeries in the next

six months, nearly double of what we've done in previous field services.

Marilyn

Sharon M. Himsl

Writer/Author. Blogging since 2011. 
Published with Evernight Teen: 
~~The Shells of Mersing