New Baby, ART outreach clinics

This week was a busy week back after a week being gone in Harare.  It’s also the end of the month so we are doing end of month reports in between seeing patients and doing procedures!  No visitors here to help me get the paper work done!

The doctors in the country went on strike on 1-March-18.  Since we are a mission hospital we don’t go on strike and so we have seen an increase in patients who are being turned away at hospitals through out the country.  We had to transfer a patient yesterday and Major went to our local district hospital and it took him over an hour for someone to take the patient and then others were asking him to take them to Chidamoyo since they had been admitted for days and no doctor had seen them!  The hospitals are in chaos as only the Administration is working and trying to keep things going.  They are supposed to attend to emergencies, but not sure what they call emergencies since some of the people who came here were very sick.

We were happy to hear that Dr. Kajese (who used to work here) and his wife No had a C/Section for their second child on Sunday the 4^th of March and welcomed a new baby girl—Zoe.  She was a bit early but is doing well after being readmitted and discharged again.  Big sister Alexis is welcoming her too.  Congratulations to them.  We hope to see him here as part of the surgery team that comes to do our elective surgeries in the next month.

This week we went out to 2 outreach clinics, Batanai and Zvarai to draw blood on or our research kids and some adults who needed their Viral Loads done.  We ran Batanai results and all the kids are doing well—no one failing—so we are so happy with that!  We think most of our kids are doing better and we hope for better results over the year they are being studied.

I enjoy going out (except for the terrible dirt roads) and being with our kids and adults on ART.  So many of these patients are personally started on ART and it is so great to see them growing up and doing well and the adults doing so well.  It gives us encouragement to keep working hard to eliminate this disease!

This week we had Agnes and Isabel from BRTI labs.  Agnes was here to look at our results so far and verify and she left on Friday.  Isabel is here for 2 weeks to help run the samples from our research in the laboratory.  They enjoyed going out into “the bush” with us to our ART clinics this week and we put them to work! 

This weekend am trying to catch up on our statistics.  As you can tell I am procrastinating by doing everything else on my list first!! 

Baby Zoe Kajese

 Agness and Isabel at Batanai 

Our group at Zvarai