We were privileged to be able to start our day in Port Antonio with a brief presentation about febrile seizures to the doctors and nurses on staff at the hospital. While febrile seizures are quite a common issue for us as pediatricians, they can be daunting for doctors who are not as familiar with kids. A lively discussion followed the presentation (as are most discussions in Jamaica) and we all walked away with a deeper understanding of practicing medicine effectively with the resources available.
That being said, now that we’ve been in Jamaica for almost three weeks, I feel that poverty has become personal. There are now names and faces and images that come to mind when I think about “resource poor settings.” It is the legs of a child with a bacterial superinfection that has been ineffectively treated for months with an antibiotic known to have a high level of resistance because there was nothing else available. It is the back of an ambulance equip with little more than a pair of latex gloves, a bag of expired normal saline, and a small sliver of hope that anything useful would be able to be accomplished should a true emergency arise. It is the mother of an asthmatic who fashioned a spacer out of plastic cups because she couldn’t afford one but acknowledges its importance for her child’s health. And while these disparities become personal, they also become impossible to ignore.
Connect With Us