Project Sekong 2012: Another day passes and the girl with the broken arm still waits for help.
On the third morning after her accident, the girl was still waiting for treatment, so we delayed work and transported her to the provincial hospital in our truck.
Report 7
As we went about our work yesterday, Yai and I were both keenly aware of the ten-year-old girl lying in the clinic next to our camp. Not that any sound came from her room. There is anguish on the child’s face but she bears the pain in her broken arm bravely, silently.
It was the total lack of activity around the clinic that most alarmed us. The girl and her family arrived here yesterday, twenty-four hours after a tree fell on her and broke her arm. (How severe a fracture is uncertain; the village nurse has chosen not to remove the splint that her family fashioned from rags and sticks. He says it looks as good as one he would apply and he has nothing more to offer.)
The nurse, Yai, and I were all led to believe that a car would arrive yesterday from the district hospital to collect the girl and to transport her back to that facility for further examination. We did hear a rumor last evening that a car was broken down along the road. Maybe that disabled vehicle is the clinic car and maybe road conditions or mechanical problems have kept the driver from reaching Dak Door. In any case, nobody knows what’s supposed to happen next, and no one has anything to offer the girl in terms of evaluation, treatment or control of pain.
Several times yesterday I would suggest to Yai, or Yai would suggest to me, that we give the girl some painkillers from our medic kit. If it was my idea, Yai would argue that village people, unaccustomed to Western medicine, often have severe reactions to medications, and that if the girl did have a dangerous reaction we’d be as unlikely to get help for that crisis as we are to get help for her arm. An hour later, Yai’s resolve would weaken and he’d suggest we offer medication. Then, I’d be the one to issue caution.
This morning, with no word of when help might arrive, we decided to transport the girl ourselves to a town about three hours away that has a bus connection to Sekong town, site of the provincial hospital. That facility is sure to have several doctors and may have an x-ray machine as well.
So… before dawn Yai and I got the girl comfortably settled on a stretcher in the back of our truck and, with her parents and sister accompanying, we headed to Attapeu in the hope of connecting with a bus to Sekong town and the provincial hospital.