(Written yesterday. Gotta love the internet).
This afternoon, I spent several hours volunteering in Ward 8 of the Mbabane Government Hospital. I was helping a woman who works with an organization called “mothers2mothers,” which deals with pregnant women and HIV/AIDS. Today, I learned how to fill out the patient records, which, while it sounds really lame, is actually an amazing opportunity. Can you imagine letting some random teenager fill out medical records on her first day in the States?
Anyways, so what happens is that when they see a patient, they write down their information in a little notebook, but then it needs to be transferred into the actual logbooks at the hospital. (Forget about computer systems; it’s all just written and re-written. Manual “copy-paste,” I suppose). Once I got into the mode of reading the nurse’s terrible handwriting, recognizing the more common Swazi names, and figuring out how to spell the various towns the women came from, I started paying more attention to the details of the forms.
There are several things that they log. First, there’s a column for whether the woman knows her partner’s status, and if so, what it is. Then, there’s a column for what the woman’s status is. At least in the ones I copied today, it was positive about half the time. There’s a column for how many children the woman already has, and whether they are HIV positive or negative. I didn’t mark a single child as positive today, which was really encouraging, as it means that these women are taking the right medication during pregnancy to prevent it from being passed onto their children.
Then came the treatment columns, where you had to mark whether the women were on all sorts of different anti-retroviral treatments, and what the child was on. This is where I had some issues, because they only wrote down one, and it was assumed that a nurse would know that “if they’re on this, they’re on this, and can’t be on this,” and so on. At first, I was just confused. But the nurse I was working with explained to me what was what, and why someone would be on something, and by the end of the time, I could de-code the medical markings and fill out the whole form.
Lastly, there was the comments section. The main thing that got written here was that the baby came out dead, which I wrote too many times. It’s technically just a form, but you can’t help but see it.
“18 years old, HIV positive, partner unknown, five months pregnant, CD4: 150 (an indication of how badly the HIV virus has impacted your system – 150 is not good), dead fetus removed.”
The last thing about it was a column to fill on whether they’d be on a certain medication for life. The nurse said to just always mark it “yes.” When I asked her why, her only response was that when they stop taking the medication, they die. They take the medication for the duration of their lives, whether they want to or not. It’s a necessity, just like food or water.
When I got back to hostel later that evening, lightning had knocked out the internet, and the power was going on and off for a while. For a moment, I was annoyed, and then I realized that I didn’t need it. I didn’t need the blanket on my bed, or the sweatshirt I was wearing, or the laptop I was holding, or the apple I had just eaten. I didn’t need ANY of it.
Maybe paperwork isn’t the most exciting job, but I’m learning about HIV/AIDS, treatments for it, and I’m working in a hospital, speaking siSwati, doing something I could never have done in the States. But regardless of all that, it’s knowing that this organization and these forms are the reason that these women have children who are HIV negative, and why they’re living into their twenties and thirties, and why some of them are still here to on this earth. Right now, to know that I’m some teeny-tiny part of all of it is all I need right now to make me fall asleep happy.
This afternoon, I spent several hours volunteering in Ward 8 of the Mbabane Government Hospital. I was helping a woman who works with an organization called “mothers2mothers,” which deals with pregnant women and HIV/AIDS. Today, I learned how to fill out the patient records, which, while it sounds really lame, is actually an amazing opportunity. Can you imagine letting some random teenager fill out medical records on her first day in the States?
Anyways, so what happens is that when they see a patient, they write down their information in a little notebook, but then it needs to be transferred into the actual logbooks at the hospital. (Forget about computer systems; it’s all just written and re-written. Manual “copy-paste,” I suppose). Once I got into the mode of reading the nurse’s terrible handwriting, recognizing the more common Swazi names, and figuring out how to spell the various towns the women came from, I started paying more attention to the details of the forms.
There are several things that they log. First, there’s a column for whether the woman knows her partner’s status, and if so, what it is. Then, there’s a column for what the woman’s status is. At least in the ones I copied today, it was positive about half the time. There’s a column for how many children the woman already has, and whether they are HIV positive or negative. I didn’t mark a single child as positive today, which was really encouraging, as it means that these women are taking the right medication during pregnancy to prevent it from being passed onto their children.
Then came the treatment columns, where you had to mark whether the women were on all sorts of different anti-retroviral treatments, and what the child was on. This is where I had some issues, because they only wrote down one, and it was assumed that a nurse would know that “if they’re on this, they’re on this, and can’t be on this,” and so on. At first, I was just confused. But the nurse I was working with explained to me what was what, and why someone would be on something, and by the end of the time, I could de-code the medical markings and fill out the whole form.
Lastly, there was the comments section. The main thing that got written here was that the baby came out dead, which I wrote too many times. It’s technically just a form, but you can’t help but see it.
“18 years old, HIV positive, partner unknown, five months pregnant, CD4: 150 (an indication of how badly the HIV virus has impacted your system – 150 is not good), dead fetus removed.”
The last thing about it was a column to fill on whether they’d be on a certain medication for life. The nurse said to just always mark it “yes.” When I asked her why, her only response was that when they stop taking the medication, they die. They take the medication for the duration of their lives, whether they want to or not. It’s a necessity, just like food or water.
When I got back to hostel later that evening, lightning had knocked out the internet, and the power was going on and off for a while. For a moment, I was annoyed, and then I realized that I didn’t need it. I didn’t need the blanket on my bed, or the sweatshirt I was wearing, or the laptop I was holding, or the apple I had just eaten. I didn’t need ANY of it.
Maybe paperwork isn’t the most exciting job, but I’m learning about HIV/AIDS, treatments for it, and I’m working in a hospital, speaking siSwati, doing something I could never have done in the States. But regardless of all that, it’s knowing that this organization and these forms are the reason that these women have children who are HIV negative, and why they’re living into their twenties and thirties, and why some of them are still here to on this earth. Right now, to know that I’m some teeny-tiny part of all of it is all I need right now to make me fall asleep happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment