Clinic at the Center

WARNING: There are mildly graphic photos in this post. Read at your own risk...

Thursday

We are holding clinic at the NCM Center today (the same place we are sleeping and eating). It is a wonderful facility and we are thrilled to be here. We have paused for lunch and I wanted to share a miracle!

This morning has been a zoo! We got our clinic all set up and set up: a triage, a dispensary, and a treatment/surgery room. The people started coming...and coming...and coming! You can't imagine how many people are crowded onto the porch of the Center! We decided we needed to set up a screen to show the Jesus Film on while people were waiting. The screen was too sheer for it to show up in the daytime though. We decided the black blankets on the beds were a perfect fix. I grabbed some of the handy-dandy suture kits from the surgery room and started stitching! The pastors at the center thought this was just great! Here you see Pastor Jude holding the screen up for me to sew - they laughed the whole time! It worked though!

And the people kept coming... Dr. Andrea decided we should send me outside to run a cursory triage and separate the really ill from the curious. You can see ALL the people crowded onto the porch...

Then we got an interesting case. A gentleman walked up to me and complained of localized chest pain. He said he had received an injury a year ago from a "soccer boot" that he got kicked with while playing soccer. He was very uncomfortable and there was a slight swollen place on his chest. I called Dr. Andrea and the three of us headed into the surgery.

Dr. Andrea deadened the area with Lidocaine and then opened the skin over the mass. She dug around a bit and was a bit perplexed - there was inflammatory tissue, but she couldn't seem to see anything else. Then she found it - she thought she had a bone spur that had developed on his bone as a result of the trauma. She was doing one last bit of poking around explaining to the man through Sugun (our interpreter) that he would need to go to a hospital to have his injury repaired. She pushed on the mass and he winced - in terrible pain. Then she moved just a bit and we saw something interesting start to peek out of the wound - it was a hard mass! It just came popping out - apparently on it's own, but we all know God touched the thing! She laid it on the gauze I was holding and then pressed on the spot where all the pain had been... his pain was TOTALLY gone! We all got tears and goosebumps! Here you can see the tumor that was removed.

And here is a photo of the patient with his surgical team...

Well, our lunch break is over and the droves are outside waiting on medical care so I must go and help. Our patient count is now at 208 for the morning and we are still going...