Boy patient

Saturday 19th June

At the moment we have a visiting Italian nurse from Y--ol, about a 2 hr car trip away. She brought some patients for treatment and thinks our hospital is wonderful. We have bed sheets and pillows and covered mattresses, not just rolls of sponge you can’t wash.

We have a Dr. and medications, an oxygen separator machine. We even have nurses that turn up for duty. Apparently, it is a government hospital, so the nurses just turn up for work on pay day, collect and go home. It sounds terrible.

She has been there since March and has a contract until August. She does not think she will be able to stay under those conditions. Her return trip is on Monday.

Our surgeon should be back in full swing tomorrow after his scorpion bite, so lots of new admissions today ready for the theatre list.

There is one little boy I would like to tell you about. He has been in the hospital for 2 months and has what the medical staff think is a Kaposi's sarcoma (Google to get full description), a form of cancer of the lymph nodes in the neck and inside his mouth. Poor lad, he is now having trouble eating, the growth is so big inside and out. He has had some chemotherapy here but very basic, it seemed to go down a little but has grown again.

Now, to all the people who so generously donated funds into my UK account for all those books and teaching DVDs, well, there was $550 USD left, so I withdrew it and brought it over with me.

So I hope that you will all be willing to let us use some of this money to send Pantar with one parent to Uganda, to a large town called Gulu, where there is a chemotherapy unit who think they might be able to save him. The money would cover his and one parent's return bus fare and food for the full time he is there. The treatment will be free.

His father is also going to sell a cow to pay for his wife to go too. That is a huge thing, to sell a cow. So hope you all agree. He is such a lovely boy and well loved by his parents.