Bombs for Christmas


On Christmas Eve, we received news that the land just across the Thai-Burma border from us would be bombed by the Burmese military government. 

The military used RPG’s, air strikes, tanks and other heavy artillery to decimate the area, forcing thousands of the nation’s own people to flee into the forest or to the edge of Burma for safety. Reports said the military government had killed women and children, and many bodies were found burnt to crisps inside vehicles. Just cruelty and fear everywhere. 

We have had an influx of the post-bombing casualty patients, from sniper bullets to the skull to paralysis to amputations to extensive wounds and broken bones, lost eye sight and more. We currently have 3 patients with tracheotomies and 3 amputees. After they stay on the unit awhile, they get moved to Patient Housing which is basically an roofed outdoor facility similar to a rest area you might stop at on a long road trip. They sleep on wooden benches in there and have no home you go to anymore. It’s filling up in there. 





I cannot tell you how many of these suffering people are only 18, 19, 23, 25 years old. Lives ruined. 

Then we have the patients who are extensions of 30 years of this type of genocide. We had 3 patients between ages 30-32 last week who died. AIDS sepsis and Tuverculosis complication; alcoholic  hypotensive upper GI bleed who AMA-ed himself to go home to see his one month old baby before he died rather than go for endoscopy at the bigger hospital because it would be to expensive did his family; and a guy with alcohol withdrawal but also STD and an enormous swollen scrotum who eventually died of sepsis. 

I was rather sad about the latter case, because no one knew he had died til morning. Then night staff checked him at midnight, he seemed fine, he was dead when they checked at 4am. I looked at the last set of vitals and HR in the 140’s, RR high 20’s. Not fine. He also had been roomed in a side hallway in the last room, no sitter, not visible to staff.  ðŸ˜­ðŸ˜­

Needless to say, my lecture series on SIRS and sepsis (which I had given the afternoon preceding these events) seems timely. None of the staff have ever heard of SIRS. But now they have, and I made them all recite the criteria about 6 times throughout the lecture. We now have a new system for tracking vital signs of patients under close observation and I’m working on an official Sepsis Protocol for them. 


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