I have officially experienced the brazilian municiple hospital and hope I never have to experience it again. Audrey spent the day pooping and the night throwing up. We went through all our blankets and extra blankets and even baby blankets, and around dawn got up to get ready to take her to the doctor. We ended up at the local municiple hospital. The good things are 1– throwing up kids get priority and 2– it’s free. That’s about as good as the hospital is going to get. The hospital itself makes American hospitals look like 4-star hotels (See, I’m not exagerating… I didn’t say 5-star, though I was tempted). It doesn’t help that the electricity is constantly cutting out. I can’t imagine what they do if a serious surgery needs done– I imagine they send those people to another city. In the same room with Audrey and I were several others taking various drips (Audrey was on saline and, I think, glucose?), a guy who fell from 5.5 meters (I just know that’s high) because the wood scaffolding supporting him broke, and his poor wife who never left his side despite being pregnant and in pain. The saline people were in and out and in and out. Audrey’s took forever. I was there from around 8am and didn’t check out until about 5pm-ish. They never really did any tests to find out why she threw up so much, but told us to drastically change her diet (which is already difficult, but at least now perhaps the people in this house will support me more with it), to give her an anti-biotic (not sure how I feel about that considering all they knew is that she threw up a lot)…. They did say when she got there she was extremelly dehydrated, though I could have told them that. She wasn’t keeping anything at all down… hence the day-long hospital visit. Now for the room…. The room contained 3 metal cots, an overhead fan, and a metal stand to hold the saline drips…. Period. That’s it. No monitors (even for the guy who’d fallen, had stitches in his head, dislocated his arm and was unsure about the state of his insides). This same guy was waiting with a simple saline drip to be able to get money for his X-rays adn the other tests they were going to have to do. Talk about cruel! Then, they asked him to get up and walk (I’m guessing to the bathroom because he came back). He was there most of the time I was. Nursing staff simply passed through, but never checked vitals. There were no charts to be seen and often a nurse would come in asking someone’s name and who their doctor was. It’s a wonder people don’t get served the wrong medicine, but again, all I really saw dripping was saline anyway….I cried pretty much the first hour we were there just thinking about how in the US we would have taken her to a children’s hospital where they would have been equipped to give her the saline drip in a more comfortable manner (as it was, it took three of us to hold her down on the cot and they taped the arm and hand with the needle in it to a torn off piece of cardboard box). She would have had things to distract her, perhaps watched Elmo. What’s more is there are no visitors before 4pm… not even Cesar, though he was able to get through for a few minutes around lunch time. How does a mom keep a 2-year-old distracted for an entire day with nothing to work with– not even visitors? In a way, it worked out that she was feeling bad because she didn’t even really ask to get off the cot. She mostly slept and let me entertain her with songs and teaching her body parts.
I then came home and, thank God someone had at least washed my sheets. I did have to clean the bathroom and my room (the stench in both rooms was unbearable, at least to me), try to organize some things, keep Audrey occupied without giving her any of the treats we sometimes give her. I have a big shopping trip to do because her juice is only going to be juice I make from the fruit itself or the frozen pulp they sell in the stores, snacks will be fruit or crackers or bread, and I’m going to get a variety of soups which will be lunch and supper. We may get creative with some natural teas that are calming for the stomach, maybe rice with cinammon or something of the sort. The key, the doctor said, for the next two weeks are foods with little to no oil/grease and no acidic or overly sweet stuff. It goes without saying that things that loosen the bowels are not what we’re looking for right now either. I wish we could figure out with some certainty what is going on with our digestive systems. I’m still losing weight (which is both good and bad, I suppose). America, please bring my family back!