Isn't it about time for a Clinic update?

I want to apologize for the lack of blogs about the clinic recently. Ginger has been very faithful to write updates about our family and adaptation to the Filipino culture. There are a couple of reasons for my lack of blogging. During the last part of April and into this week in May, I have had several bad weeks of feeling miserable, running a high fever, unable to eat, unable to get out of bed. I truly felt like death on a Ritz cracker. The first week in May was probably the sickest I have been in many, many years. Fortunately, the memory of those 2 weeks now just blur together into one big, very long, terrible day. I am still not sure what my diagnosis was – it was a fever of unknown source. All my labs were normal except for a high White blood cell count with a high neutrophil percentage. I had a few ideas about the possible causes but lacked the proper lab tests to distinguish any particular cause.

I appreciate those of you who prayed for me. I know Ginger sent an email to some about my sickness and in return, we received many words of encouragement through email and phone calls. If I spoke with you or emailed you during that time, please forgive any incoherent statements or mumblings made.

As for the clinic, we have had some very interesting and some very difficult cases recently. It seems the severity of illness that we are treating is increasing. There have been an increasing number of extra-pulmonary (outside the lung) cases of tuberculosis with some showing signs of being resistant to our current supply of medications. I will discuss this more in one of our future newsletters. Some of our sickest heart and lung problems would certainly be hospitalized in the USA but we struggle to manage them through the clinic since hospitalization would certainly deprive them of many of the resources they need for food, shelter and the necessities of life.

One of our biggest blessings this month was the arrival of our ultrasound. This equipment came from the same hospital closure in Illinois that also provided us with an EKG recently. The ultrasound was so large that it had to be crated and shipped separately from the smaller items. In God’s perfect timing and planning, a non-profit group with world-wide logistics connections offered to ship our ultrasound here free of charge. This hospital quality ultrasound will provide a great benefit to our patients. The various imaging transducers will allow us to perform 2-dimensional echocardiograms (heart images), obstetric measurements (for the moms to be), abdominal and soft tissue imagines (such as liver, gallbladder, kidneys, etc).





Our equipment is first off the shipping container.










The packing crate was so big we had to disassemble it just so we could put the Ultrasound on the truck.













Finally on our truck and ready to head back to the clinic!