another week done

With the busy clinics, the weeks just fly by as we cycle from hospital to home to hospital... etc. This week we're at full staff for the first time since sometime in February. I'm really glad to have my colleagues back. It will give us some flexibility to spend more time on the inpatients, and continue to work on our other projects - intern teaching, outreach, the search for the drugs and supplies etc we need to do our jobs, etc. We're aiming to get out to the associations to try to increase testing of kids of HIV positive patients, and ensure referrals of kids who are HIV positive. We also want to work with the inpatient units to increase the testing there. The under 3 ward has started doing more systematic testing - which is just great. They've said they're a little discouraged because there are so many negative ones. But at least then we know they are really negative. And we are finding some seropositive ones along the way too.

It is wonderful to see a few of the first kids we started on ARVs are starting to gain weight and getting better.

Speaking of weight, we have another promise of PlumpyNut - ready to eat therapeutic food - for our kids. I've mentioned before that the majority of the HIV infected kids are malnourished, especially those under about 5 years. The CREN (nutritional rehabilitation and education center) provides some food for those kids but many of them still don't gain weight, and the porridge they get doesn't provide adequate calories. Even if you have all the other parts of malnutrition care working well, if you can't feed the kids, you won't succeed. So we are lusting after PlumpyNut, we have fantasies of being able to give it to our kids...

We've had PlumpyNut waved in front of our noses before but it didn't pan out. So we're trying not to get our hopes up but at the same time, receiving this food would be a revolution in the care of malnourished kids here.

We are getting better at finding what we need. Not having the basic supplies to do our job has been one of the biggest stressors of this year. Its been really hard. However, the upside is that we're learning more from our mistakes than we would have from having the answers handed to us. But at what cost?

Anyhow, its the weekend now, and I'm looking forward to some balafone music, and some relaxation to get ready for the week ahead.