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Christopher Attiah
Our first experience with Christopher taking ill was quite harrowing. On the 24th of March Julie and I picked Christopher up from his grandmother as she said he had been ill for a couple of days. We took him to the hospital that night, he was very ill and needed to be admitted, at that point Christopher weighed less than 4 kilos. When we first brought him in the Cuban doctors at the hospital were not optimistic at all about his chances of survival. He was very ill with malaria and also had severe dehydration and anemia brought on by the malaria. He needed a transfusion of two pints of blood and an IV fluids. He was listless and could not raise his head, arms and could not sit up, his skin was paled and wrinkled, he was too weak even to cry, and the whites of his eyes were yellowed. He stayed in the hospital for three nights. Julie, Marcy and I took turns spending the night with him, as in Ghanaian hospitals it is the mothers and not the nurses who feed, bath and give the medicines to the child. It was frightening not knowing if you would be woken in the night to feed him, or awaken to find him not breathing. In fact The night I stayed with him the baby girl next to me, who was too thin to put an IV in passed away. After Christopher recovered we kept him at the home for a few weeks to monitor him, in the first week of staying with us he gained a kilogram! The doctors were very impressed with his progress and when we brought him for his check up they even brought him around to the ward and said that Christopherís health was a good example of what dedication could achieve. I understand that his recovery had a large part to do with the resources we had at our disposal, the formula and medicines we could afford to buy as well as the luck of having Marcy, Canadian nurse volunteer, around to make sure he was getting the proper care. Now almost 7 months later Christopher is on a regular regimen of medication, the doctors cannot believe that it is the same child who was so ill all those months ago, he now weights more than 10 kilos! The doctors are no longer telling us to feed him more, now they say do not feed him soooo much. He is now walking and babbling and laughing most the time, except when he has to take medicine for a chronic chest infection he has. A far cry from the baby that Julie and I spent so many nights watching over fearing if he would make it through the night. |