Success!

Success!, originally uploaded by mattcotham.

This man came in after he had tried to commit suicide by slashing open

his throat. Psychiatric care is one of the things that I really

struggle with here in Zambia, partially because my language skills are

still rudimentary, partially because we have only basic medications to

treat people with, and partially because the follow-up is done by

untrained personnel, if at all. Who knows if this man will do okay at

his house or not. When he arrived on early Sunday morning a week ago,

he had cut most of the way across his windpipe, so that he was breathing

out of the hole in his throat. I was called out of bed to see someone

who 'had a cut on his neck"; I asked if it could wait until I was to

come in to the hospital a few hours later and they said I should come

see him now, and we went to the OR where I put a breathing tube down the

hole and tried to sew up his trachea around it. He unfortunately had

cut through the larynx, above the vocal cords, so he kept draining

saliva down through the wound; however, as the wound healed up this got

to be less, and we finally took him back to the theater where we put a

tube down his throat from above and sewed up the external hole. And he

is doing great, able to talk, swallow his saliva, and looks much

better. We've been praying pretty hard for him here, and the surgeon

says that people he worked with say that they've never had a patient

with a tracheostomy survive in Africa, so he's a testament to the grace

of God. I'll put the follow-up picture next.