There's no denying it, these bloggers are bound to make you jealous. Whether it's their guts, their energy or their tan you admire, overseas volunteers have got plenty to share with you about their remarkable work in fascinating countries. Read on to find out what you could be missing.

All | Ashley | Natalie | David | Sheila | Jonathan | James | Abi | Fiona | Community_Action_International | Project Mongolia | Sarah | Emily | Dana | Selina | Lucy | Hannah | Sally | Lucille | Martyn

Thursday Dec 16, 2010

Personal experience of cholera

10:30pm on the night before my birthday I was relaxing at home with a couple of friends.  A close friend of mine, Manette received a call from her sister to say their father, Jacques has been vomiting.  Asking a few more questions I was almost certain this gentleman had cholera.  Without immediate treatment cholera can dehydrate people so quickly that they can die within hours of onset of symptoms. We needed to get him to a cholera treatment centre immediately:  The difficulty was, that he lived in Labadee, a remote fishing village: a 1 hour drive and 15minute water taxi ride away from the nearest treatment centre.

Amazingly, Manette's family had managed to get Jacques onto a water taxi, in the pitch dark and were waiting for a 'tap tap' (shared taxi) to ride into town. At this time however, even in town the streets are deserted and there is certainly no public transport.

After half an hour of roaming the streets, asking anyone and everyone including the police we eventually found someone who was willing to drive us there to collect him.  As we jumped in the car and charged off I realised there was an almost finished litre bottle of rum rolling around on the passenger seat.  With the driver treating the mountain roads as a racing track I have never been so scared for my safety.  At one point we skidded off the road headed towards a ditch, but the driver somehow managed to pull the car back onto the road as we span into a 180 degree turn.

As soon as we arrived at Jacques it was clear to see time was running out fast.  He was severely dehydrated, and had only drunk half a litre of the rehydration solution I had asked his family to make for him.  His body was shutting down: he couldn't speak or stand and needed to be carried into the car.
2 ½ hours after that phone call he finally arrived at the treatment centre. The biggest treatment centre in the region, the MSF are working out of the public gymnasium. 300 patients are being treated in the main hall, with another 300 in tents outside.

6 litres of special IV fluid was pumped into him within the first hour and he continued to have IV fluid running into him through the night whilst his wife stayed with him. When we visited him the next day he was much more stable.  He was talking and able to sit on the bucket to go to the toilet.
When we returned that evening the doctors handed over that he had nearly died a couple of hours before as he had not been drinking enough oral rehydration. With his wife having stayed with him for 24 hours I decided to stay with him whilst Manette took her mum home for a shower and some sleep.  However, things started getting worse again.

After being made to drink such a lot of fluid to save his life, he was now refusing to drink.  As the minutes wore on he became more and more agitated, distressed and delirious, and was still refusing to drink.  After almost an hour the doctor decided to put a second IV line in, but because he was so agitated, it took four men to restrain him to insert the IV. I was trying to get hold of Manette, worried that Jacques did not have long to go, but she wasn't answering her phone. By this point we had collected a crowd of other patients' visitors, curiously watching the only agitated patient in the room being treated by several members of staff, and cared for by a 'blanc' or white person, who, by this time was getting quite distressed herself.  I eventually managed to get hold of Manette and luckily by the time she and her mother arrived Jacques had stabilised again.

I was desperate to stay with Jacques for the rest of the night as I knew he needed to be monitored very closely, but Manette quite rightly wanted her mother to stay with him.  Manette and her sisters stayed at my flat that night, close to the treatment centre.  We got a call at 5am to say that Jacques had started becoming agitated again, but within ten minutes, on our way to the centre we got a call to say he had passed away.

As we approached the centre, we could hear his wife screaming with heartache, and a journalist lining his camera up to take a shot.  I walked her back to my flat whilst Manette went to see her father's body.

Being the day of elections there was again no public transport to take Manette's family back to Labadee.  Expecting riots and road blocks all over town later in the day I knew we had to act quickly. Taking a moto to the other side of town to pick up our work car I was then able to drive them home. The journey was an incredibly vivid experience for me.  Culturally, Haitians are very open about grieving. Manette, two of her sisters and her mother were crying, shouting and wailing throughout the journey.  A strange experience for me, but it enabled them to release their emotions and share their grieving process.

These few days have been an incredible shock to my system. Just as I do with work at home, it's very easy, and important, to keep a professional outlook on the healthcare work I do.  But having a personal experience on the effects of cholera to individuals and their families has really hit home how much pain and grief this epidemic is causing to so many families.

Posted by Hannah ( 4:25 PM )
Link to this post Comments[1]