At work a few days ago

I love what I do here, and at times it's more apparent to me than usual. For instance....every time this little girl Esther (on the right) sees me at the eye clinic, she runs headlong toward me with her arms outstretched and a big smile on her face, wanting to be picked up. She's a 4 yr old child who can't stand still more than 2 seconds (I was going to say 5 seconds, but that would be too long!). But she is very sweet and shows all her affection with her whole body rather than speaking much. I've removed cataracts from both of her eyes now. When she arrived, she was only able to see well enough to count fingers, and now she is able to see several lines on the eye chart with both eyes and is more precocious than ever.

The boy on the left, Erwin, is just as winsome as Esther. They're not related to each other, but when I saw them sitting together, I just had to snap this picture. When Erwin first arrived, his bilateral cataracts were so dense that he could only tell the difference between light and dark. He was very demure and compliant as his mother led him by the hand. After his first surgery, it was a delight to watch him over the next few days as his curiousity slowly awakened and he began wanting to see and investigate everything around him. He seemed to be everywhere, exploring on his own now, and I saw him almost every day somewhere around the clinic and inpatient ward. It was great when he started waving to me from afar.

A day or two after this photo was taken of these two kids above, with this great story, a third child was brought in by his parents with a much sadder situation. We have big ups and downs here....This family had to travel 3 days to get to our hospital. The boy was only 6 months old and he had a very large tumor growing behind his right eye and into the right side of his head that had only been first noticed a month ago - likely a retinoblastoma. In this blog, I wrote about another little girl with a similar situation who came in 3-4 months ago; same tumor. Like her, this little boy's tumor was too advanced to save his life. We offered to give him pain medication in an attempt at hospice care over the last week or two of his life, but the family decided to leave the next day. May the Lord comfort and walk with them through this terrible time. Hospice care is something that doesn't exist here and is really missed at times like this.

As you've likely read down below, I'm doing more studying for my boards exam now, so Eric is doing more of the blog entries and you'll get to hear more about what our non-medical lives are like here for the next few months. But every now and then I'll try to put in a word or two for our patients :) .