Guyana Nurse Training Program: Road berries and battling the green monster

Making up for two days of blogging, as my brain is sometimes too full and tired to write every day!

Tuesday was a road trip to the NICU in New Amsterdam. Randy, Kate, Aruna and I went to see why the NICU had been shut down and what suggestions we could make for improvement and the re-opening. To our surprise, the hospital administration informed us that the unit was open, but they didn't have any babies (hospital management and government has a way of magically reopening units and solving issues when the Americans and Canadians are coming to visit). Regardless, we were pleasantly welcomed with a very clean and organized NICU due to three of our training program graduates who have taken leadership within the unit. Ross, Benn, and Rachel, three of our best students, are all working in New Amsterdam and have done a great job of making sure the unit space, equipment and supplies were ready for the first baby to "walk" in the door. Randy helped to make sure the transport incubator and monitor were in working order (even trying the monitor on himself while educating Ross and Benn on it's use).

Our ride to and from New Amsterdam, though scary at times (going 90 miles an hour while swerving around cars on a two lane road full of pot holes gave us the full Guyana experience), was very scenic- a nice change from the hustle and bustle of Georgetown. One the way home, we had to wait for the drawbridge to close to cross the Berbice river, leaving Randy with a little too much time on his hands to check out the scenery. Being the nature lover health nut that he is, he found a new "berry" supposedly called the Bora Bora berry (though no Guyanese person has ever heard of it except our driver who assured him it was ok to eat)- This berry has a dust coating on it with sharp leaves and is an attracter of biting ants- it grows on the side of the road so it's also covered in road dirt. I decided to call them Road berries (kind of like road apples but not as pungent)- so below is a picture of Randy with his road berries. Our house mate Julie said they tasted, "like if a cherry tomato made love to a cranberry"...I wasn't brave enough to try (I know, shocking!). Of course, Randy did what he does best which is to make a jam out of the berries and put them on cassava wafers to make "tarts" which he then tried to push on anyone at the hospital who would listen and take one....he's such a tart pusher.

Wednesday was back at Georgetown, where my #1 priority was to fight the little green monsters, germs. Why is it that in every cartoon or healthcare video germs are little green monsters? Regardless, I had Aruna get on the phone and have one of the infectious disease guys, Thompson Apatu, meet me in the NICU for a walk through. I started by buttering him up with questions I knew were easy- what did he recommend for cleaning the isolettes?- before moving on to the hand gel. I placed one of the orange containers next to the clear one and asked him, "so what do you think about this?" His response: "that's not hand gel, it's something else" Exactly. Needless to say, our walkthrough was productive- many questions answered and while not all of our hand gel bottles were refilled, we had 5 new complete bottles by the end of the day, with a promise to come back tomorrow to refill the rest. Score! Who knew hand gel would make me so happy? It's the little things.

Our NICU has a resident baby, and everyone has taken a liking to her, especially Kate. She's an ex-27 weeker who has miraculously survived, though malnourished, without need for excess intervention. Her mom has abandoned her at GPHC, so the staff take turns feeding her. With the hospital being "baby friendly" to promote breastfeeding, they were feeding her with a syringe as artificial nipples are not allowed. Kate convinced the docs to let her have a bottle as she's obviously never being breast fed, so with the go-ahead she went and bought her a bottle at the pharmacy. The baby was finally named today, Asha, which means "Hope" in Amerindian. She took to the bottle like a champ, even though the bottle was as big as her head! Definitely a much needed good story.