48hrs in Haiti

I was planning to write about a crazy 24hr time period here, as it seemed to be wrapping up...and then I got swept up in more madness, so now to tell the tale of 48hrs here in Haiti (a week after the fact, as I am just now recovering):

• I awoke minutes before Ninotte called me to the dome because a baby had a slow heart beat and they were worried they might need help when the baby was born. The baby was born just fine however, with a cord around it's neck
• I stayed up at the dome as another girl was in labor
• Swafet (grounds-man) cracked his head open. He wouldn't let me stitch it, so I steri-stripped it...
• Another girl came in labor...and then another
• Meanwhile the water ran out up at the dome and I had to go down to fetch water in buckets so that we could wash our hands and flush the toilet
• That night I slept up at the dome with the 3 labor patients all egging each other on with labor pains. In truth, only one of them was in active labor and the other were just getting infected with the energy... One of the patient's parents started to sing a prayer... another patient's mom started to chant very loudly and frantically (I assumed it was vudou-related by how it sounded, but the apprentice told me that's just how some people pray to Jesus) ...the dome's energy was out of control. We kept trying to ask people to keep it down so as not to provoke the other patients further/let everyone sleep, but it just keep slipping out of control. Somewhere around 3am, I think I fell asleep for an hour. I was up and down a million times though: massaging, consoling, doling out homeopathics, and trying to get them to just sleep!
• In the morning, I helped apprentice, Marianne, clean the clinic, and then we went down to shower and eat. Then the post-natals visits till noon, but not before a fight broke out in the tent camp, which is squats on our land....
• At post-natals I was so tired, I felt like I was in another world. I got to amputate the little hanging extra pinkie of a baby born a few days prior (no bone attached it to the hand). The baby had actually had another extra hanging pinkie on the other hand, but it fell off in transit from the shower where babe had been born (see earlier entry) to her room in the dome...may those pinkies find each other to rest in peace... Another woman brought her baby for a visit, who we'd seen the week before and referred to the doctor, because he was making a very odd noise in his throat. She told us that she did not go to the doctor, but her husband went to the vudou priest and did a ceremony, and the baby has been cured since... On a similar note, we've had fewer births recently and apparently the women aren't coming, especially if they go into labor at night, because our neighborhood specifically has a lot of "bad spirits"...
• We transfered the patient who had been actively laboring for 3 days to the hospital and sent the other two home to eat/walk/bathe/etc since they weren't really active in labor.
• Later that day we heard that a guy in the tent camp has been sick with a fever for 22 days and won't go to the doctor because a vudou priest told him that someone had put 5 zombies on his head and that he needed to keep coming to him (and paying him) to fix it...in reality he probably has malaria, which is a fairly quick and inexpensive fix...
• Every Sunday in Lent there are Catholic-Vudou parades, which are loud and crazy, and just happened to take place during this 48hrs
• We got the 2 laboring patients back later that day, plus another who delivered quickly.
• I went to bed, thinking, great! A good night's sleep after an action-packed day and night (Melinda and Ninotte were up at the dome). Just before I was about to crash however, I got a call because both women were about to deliver at the same time-ish and so I may as well be there. I caught the first baby, who scared me a little with his tight-fitting shoulders... 4 MINUTES later, the other baby was born and needed resuscitation... I had to leave my mom and babe to the care of an apprentice to help. Thankfully the baby did fine, but just about then, my mom started to hemorrhage (big baby, long labor, probably not great nutrition). We all had to hop back to my patient's room (thankfully they're only actually divided by a sheet), and throw in an IV, give her shots of pitocin, catheterize her bladder, squeeze her uterus....it was like being back in the hospital...Crazy!! Thankfully we were all up there!
• ....and then another mom came in labor! Much to our delight, she wasn't really in labor and we told her to just sleep... The moms and babies all ended up doing great, and we headed to bed around 4:30am...
• The following day was a class day for apprentices, so we just called it off. I slept till 10, and then we discharged the 3 moms and sent home the not very active labor, and cleaned the clinic. I was still running on adrenaline that day and continued going (without having anything to really do, but feeling too strung out to sleep) until the evening
• The following few days I felt like a total zombie (but not of the vudou variety who harm people)... Only today would I say that I finally recovered (several days past)