The "NICU" Experience

Last week I got the chance to take a small tour of some of the hospital - Moi Teaching & Referral Hospital (MTRH). MTRH is one of two large referral hospitals in the entire nation, the other one is in Nairobi. MTRH has much more capability than other hospitals or health care centres around other parts of the country. Thus, they get patients who are sicker & at higher risk for various things. I asked to see their sick nursery or NICU. The pictures are below. The room is simply a small room with shelves (not isoletes) and to keep the preemies warm the temperature in the room is extremely hot provided by wall heaters. I was told that they have seen a handful of babies survive who are born around 26 weeks or 900 grams. This is incredible to me! When we you see the conditions & understand some of their treatment capabilities it is even more incredible to me. They don't have any ventilators. In fact, I'm not sure how much they use oxygen for any respiratory treatment - I didn't see any babies on oxygen while I was there. They don't do any central lines - if needed, they may start a small IV heplock. Every baby gets an NG feeding tube & they just pour the food down in order to get them to grow since no one is ever on parentral nutrition. And yet, somehow certain babies seem to survive. Babies are amazing to me. I thought some of you would enjoy seeing the pictures of their NICU. They are actually getting ready to move into this large, beautiful new building - the new Mother/Baby hospital.

Here are the babies, lying in their shelves, wrapped in blankets - their charts are underneath.

A few more shelved babies on the next wall.

Two naked babies with heplocks. I think they were recent newborns & were being more closely observed which is why they are not bundled.

A closer look at the bundled babies lying in their shelves.

Below the shelves are the wall heaters to keep the room hot!

Right outside of the main room there is another smaller room they use for isolation. They put babies who have come from home here as well as any septic babies. The box in the left corner is their phototherapy box with lights.

Holiday time in Kenya

So Kenyans have a number of holidays, I have already experienced at least 3 different Kenyan holidays, including a day to celebrate Moi. Moi was the longest standing president that Kenya had from 1978 to 2002. But living with a number of Mzungus, there has been the celebration of an American holiday, Thanksgiving, along with American traditions of Christmas preparation. For the past few weeks, Sarah Ellen Mamlin (wife of Dr Mamlin the IU AMPATH director) has been preparing for numerous Christmas parties that will take place in the hospital, with AMPATH and other outlying AMPATH clinics in the area. She determined that this year she needed to make 1400 Christmas cookies for the parties and hundreds of gifts for the children. So in a matter of two weeks, myself and a few other people volunteered to help make all the cookies. We did sugar cookies with icing. It took a week just to roll out the dough, make the shapes & then bake the cookies. The following week we did the icing & decorations on all 1400 of them. I definitely found it strange making Christmas cookies in November in a very hot climate too!

In addition to Christmas preparations, we celebrated Thanksgiving here at the IU House last Thursday evening. We had both Americans & Kenyans at our dinner, totaling about 60 people. It was the largest Thanksgiving I have ever been to and probably the most food as well. Of course, there was turkey & stuffing & mashed potatoes & cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. I made the pumpkin pies (3 in all) from scratch, from the pumpkin. It was quite an experience. Kenyans don't ever bake and they have these small half ovens (often they don't even work) and it was fun trying to find oven space for 3 pies that afternoon. But they turned out well! Along with our American food there was lots of Kenyan food as well. Kenyans cannot have a celebration without goat (called Nyoma Choma) and Ugali (cornmeal mixture that I dislike). We had quite the feast. I definitely savored every bite of the dinner, Thanksgiving has never tasted so good!

The IU House dining hall, decorated for our Thanksgiving meal.

Thanksgiving decorations that Sarah Ellen provided that have been used for the past 4 years.

Dr. Joe Mamlin carving one of the two turkeys we ate!

My 3 pumpkin pies - yummy!

Lots of people eating Thanksgiving.

Christmas cookie decorating at the Mamlin's house.

Frosting the cookies during the 2nd week of cookie baking

The beautiful finished product - just image 1400 of these!

Preparing hundreds of gift bags for the children for Christmas, most included a beanie baby, a pen, small pad of paper, small candy & vaseline. You would be surprised by how many people love pens here! I am always asked if I have a pen I could give someone.

More of the gift bags full of goodies. We tied red & green ribbons around each paper bag & colored Christmas shapes & designs on every one.