There are the moments of adrenaline ... of holding a bleeding artery under gloved hands to stop the wild spurting, of chest compressions riding down the hallway on a stretcher. Of squeezing a bag to watch a chest rise and fall, of giving a drug and watching a heart slow, slow again back to normal...another life saved.
Here there is another, a quieter lifesaving that goes on day by day, moment by quick moment in the sterile rooms of the OR. Tumors that would take a life – by slow poison, by choking or starvation, by bleeding and bleeding until there is no blood left. It’s like watching an artist at work, I thought, watching our maxillofacial surgeon explain his repair as he sewed. The same hands that take out that tumor piece together a face again.
4-year old Esther showed up at the eye clinic with a cancerous tumor growing inside of her eye. That afternoon the opthamology team took out her eye and the tumor, giving her a chance to live past 5...another life saved.
Afi was starving. The tumor that had been growing for eight years now left her only a small mouth hole to spoon in porridge, to squirt in water by the syringe-full. Down to the size of a child, she was slowly starving to death. When she came in she had little blood left – we heard another crewmember called overhead, and another…
paged to donate pint by pint a replacement for the bucketfuls lost. As of this week she now has blood, she has a mouth, and she has hope.And there is the renewal of hope - a soul hidden in bright layers of shame along with a disfigured body finally now daring to come out into the open. A blind woman, seeing the world for the first time. A baby gaining weight despite a broken face, with the possibility of life, marriage, children, community...another life saved.
A life lost… 
She bleated pitifully as I looked for a vein, any vein, in the shriveled arm that waved at me from a nest of bright African cloth. Words like failure to thrive, cleft palate, possible metabolic problems…all these fade off into nothing in the stark reality of the here and now. At just over a year, Ana weighed about as much as a newborn child. A drastic comparison to the chubby baby pictures from her cleft lip repair last year.
Ana went home two days later. A home where she is fat and happy and crawling. Where no one looks at her and calls her cursed. Where she thrives! Here we grieve for her and her family…knowing that our best was not enough. But was it? Was it enough to know that she is loved, that she is wanted, that now her broken face and body are whole? In the end, each life is in God’s hands.
We came to Africa to bring God’s hope and healing, they tell us. Nurses save lives, we say. Only God can save lives; sometimes he chooses to take them home.
What is life but a gift? Years, months, days…they are each one in God’s hand.
She bleated pitifully as I looked for a vein, any vein, in the shriveled arm that waved at me from a nest of bright African cloth. Words like failure to thrive, cleft palate, possible metabolic problems…all these fade off into nothing in the stark reality of the here and now. At just over a year, Ana weighed about as much as a newborn child. A drastic comparison to the chubby baby pictures from her cleft lip repair last year.
Ana went home two days later. A home where she is fat and happy and crawling. Where no one looks at her and calls her cursed. Where she thrives! Here we grieve for her and her family…knowing that our best was not enough. But was it? Was it enough to know that she is loved, that she is wanted, that now her broken face and body are whole? In the end, each life is in God’s hands.
We came to Africa to bring God’s hope and healing, they tell us. Nurses save lives, we say. Only God can save lives; sometimes he chooses to take them home.
What is life but a gift? Years, months, days…they are each one in God’s hand.
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