I don't think I've ever had an experience that hit me as hard as Uganda did. Honestly, the flashbacks and images that haunted me afterwards, that made me grimace and shudder when they suddenly erupted in my mind at various times throughout the day, they reminded me of my first car accident. I had had my car only a month before I was t-boned. I still remember the flashback images, see the other car entering into my car just ahead of where I was seated.
The point is, I literally had stressful flashbacks of the experience. I couldn't force myself to actually think about it because it was that trying. The pain that people had to go through, the needless pain... The children in pain. Doctors and nurses and nursing students, digging away into a child's pelvic region, searching for the femoral artery in order to get a blood sample, when a cannula has already been inserted into their hands, making a perfectly good point at which to draw blood. That man with the laceration to his head, and the nursing student who laughed at the pain as he stitched up a wound that was certain to become infected later...
The only clear thought I had afterwards was that I needed to go back, not necessarily to those hospitals, but to ones like them, and correct the wrongs being done, training nurses and students properly. If the students are practicing medicine too early out of sheer necessity, they need to know how to do so without screwing up the patients even more than when they came in.
I keep on feeling like there's more to glean from it though...
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