Before I went on holiday we had a 1yr and 6 month old girl who was admitted to ICU. She was “sick bad bad wan” and was one of a long line of very sick patients in ICU at that time. It was a depressing and very stressful time to be working there.
This little girl had pneumococcal meningitis. She was one of the first patients I have been able to make a definitive diagnosis for, as she had an LP and was part of a WHO surveillance study so we were able to get a definite result. Despite initially getting a bit better, she then became sicker and sicker. She started, and continued fitting. She regressed developmentally. She continued to have high fevers. She started having profuse diarrhoea. I was giving up hope. She did however get her antibiotics. Every day. The nurses on ICU made sure she received her meds and made sure that she got her IV fluids or got fed properly. But she didn’t seem to be getting any better. And then she disappeared. None of the nurses knew what happened to her and I thought that the family had absconded with her. I thought she would die, or be very disabled as a consequence of her meningitis.
Today, more than a month after I last saw her, she turned up in outpatients with her mother. She had developed a fever again. She has malaria. But she is back to her normal self; walking, talking, playing. I tell God tenki.
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