At the time of Dr. Karen Schneider’s visit to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Guyana, a malaria epidemic due to mosquito bites afflicted people in a jungle village about an hour-and-a-half plane ride away. Nearly 800 of the village’s population of 12,000 had malaria, including three of the limited medical staff members. When word got out that there was a medical student among them, officials immediately rushed Schneider to the village hospital.
“I was just completely out of my league. I had no idea what to do. There were people and bodies all over this clinic. When I walked into the clinic I almost threw up because the stench was horrible,” Schneider recalled.
She said there were four beds for about 20 people, one of whom was dead. To clean the bodies, Schneider asked villagers to bring her water in the sweltering heat.
All She Knew
Schneider said that the only thing she knew was that the patients were all dehydrated. “We cleaned up this one guy,” she explained, “and he had a puddle [of sweat] around him when his fever broke and he couldn’t drink because he was vomiting.” All that day she used intravenous therapy [IV] to help with the dehydration.
When she woke up one morning, she looked out her window and saw canoes coming from as far as she could see because word had somehow got out that there was a doctor at the clinic. “This is bugging me, this experience, because I realized there were people dying without IVs,” Schneider describes her frustration. “The number one children killer is diarrhea. Know why? Because they don’t have an IV.”
Schneider was only supposed to stay a week but she ended up staying a month in the village, in which time not a single person died simply because she knew how to use an IV.
Schneider shared this story and others during her Mercy Week presentation on global healthcare Wednesday, Sept. 30.
The Journey with Mercy
Her journey started in 1996 as a fourth year medical student studying abroad in Guyana at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. After expressing her dissatisfaction working at this hospital, which served with middle-class citizens, she was sent on that plane ride into the jungle. She described this place as “a world that looked like civilization hadn’t touched in 2,000 years.” Here, the only mode of transportation was by canoe, and the food source was whatever the villagers caught.
Schneider told the story of a native woman who came up to her with a little boy, the woman’s only son, and said, “This is your son.” Schneider said people often try to give their kids to her so the children could have a better life. But that was not the case this time. The woman explained that when Schneider was there six years ago, he was an infant and the medical staff was able to save him simply because they could give him an IV. The villagers viewed the child as reborn, and they held a renaming ceremony — to name him Karen. “I think my presence had something to do with him living, maybe.”
The Mercy Medical Mission travels to Guyana, Peru and Haiti, among other places. Schneider said that 12 percent of children don’t make it to the age of five in Haiti because they die of malnutrition and diarrhea. She said the middle class live in homes with a tin roofs and most Haitians wear shoes made from tires. The unemployment rate is 80 percent. Schneider spoke of a man who couldn’t find a job. He was educated, fluent in five languages and thought himself the luckiest man because she paid him $10 a day to translate for her.
Children in Pain, in Need
Health issues that Americans easily cure are deadly to people living in the third-world. One common ailment is the bite of the scabies mite, which lives underneath the skin where it feeds and reproduces. The bites are extremely itchy -- so itchy that one child rubbed to the bone in his feet. Because there is no water, people’s scratch the bites with dirty nails and cause impetigo. People don’t have $2.50 for treatment, the cost of one bottle of Permethrin, a synthetic chemical used to treat insect infestation. One bottle can treat up to five children.
Another problem is worms. Almost every child in Africa, India and Southeast Asia has them. Schneider said that most kids play in the dirt, which in poor countries often doubles as a bathroom. Worm eggs are transmitted from people to the soil. An easy fix is one five-cent tablet of Albendazole, a drug used for the treatment of worm-infestation. Without this inexpensive medicine, intestinal blockage occurs and children in places such as Haiti have green-colored vomit. Most people can’t afford surgery to correct the condition, so the children die.
Nursing major Alyssa Smith was shocked after learning that children die from diseases that are affordable to cure in the United States. “It’s really horrible because if we have the technologies to prevent the diseases then no one should have to suffer through a disease that is preventable.”
What Can You Do?
Smith added that service trips are one way young people can help. “I feel like with the knowledge I will gain as a nursing student, this is what I should do. I should share my knowledge and help people with it.”
Schneider’s Mercy Medical Mission also checks children for anemia and provides proper vitamins and iron supplements to correct the condition. Schneider said mothers often refuse to give their children the vitamins because if the children are feeling better, they can cry at night from hunger.
Stunting is often an outcome of such malnutrition. Schneider showed a picture of an eight-year-old girl who looked like she was four due to malnutrition.
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