Bottle of Worms
The countdown is on… just a few days to graduate college. A senior student indeed and that came with privileges like having the cool hospital placement and even better, enjoying the hospital meals. The hospital meals were only enjoyed by registered nurses who would choke on the thought of sharing the mushy meal with students. I vividly recall the despicable occurrences and tales of the lengths the students went through to eat the food or at least sabotage it before the lethargic registered nurses would gobble on it. A narrative for another day.
Theatre placement my favorite. Great placement only enjoyed by the senior students with the luxury of what hospital placement could give. A flexible schedule, quantity of quality meals as no institution want to prepare repulsive meals for the surgeons. Definitely some of the highs of college. The lows didn’t miss their moments either and for me the lowest hit in the same placement.
An eleven-year-old boy under nourished with severe abdominal distension scheduled for laparotomy due intestinal obstruction was brought to the unit for laparotomy. Laparotomy was a common procedure in the theatre but this one cut too deep. A wide open abdomen, with inflated, fully packed extensive length of dark intestine. The surgeon carefully dissected the intestines and to everyone’s disbelief, live worms wiggle in our little boy’s intestines. Milking the intestines of the worms and necrosed intestines excised our boy was sutured up and ready to be taken back to the recovery unit. With the available resources the surgical team did deliver the best. Stuck with a large kidney dish full of huge round worms there were so many suggestions of what to do with them and all settled on taking them to the school skills lab. As the student I was tasked with ensuring I package the worm and deliver them. Not equipped with big enough specimen containers, I washed a bottle that had just been emptied of povidone filled it with not much formalin and the worms.
A bottle full of intestinal roundworms to the skills Lab. The students might get to see the worms during lessons, maybe they threw out the worms, but was that enough? Does that create awareness to the children and their families? Is that the end of such cases? Are any interventions put into place to prevent this as it is a completely preventable condition?
Invested in the wellbeing of our boy, two days later I decided to stop by the surgical unit and check on our little guy. The sad news of his death broke my heart. A single tablet worth cents would have prevented this. Adequate knowledge by the family on deworming would have kept our boy safe.
Life moves on but since then I chose to stand with the little ones, equip them with sufficient health knowledge and care. Alone, one will not be able to get through to all the needy ones but we will push to reach as many as we can in any way we can and so should you. This way we get to save more lives, together.
