Australian Surgeon at Africa Inland Church Kijabe Hospital in Kenya, Dr Peter Bird, reports life is never dull in Africa!
“A few weeks ago I was called urgently to casualty to see a patient who’d been stabbed in the chest.
“These kinds of calls make me nervous, so I walked down briskly, wondering what I would find.
“Two drunk men had been arguing over a woman, and in the ensuing fight one had been stabbed in the middle of the left chest close to the sternum.
“He was stable but a chest x-ray revealed a worryingly large heart shadow. An ultra sound of the heart showed me some fluid inside the heart sac or pericardium.
“Not being too eager to do cardiac surgery at 1 am, (or actually not being too eager to do it at all!), I decided to observe him closely overnight in the ICU.
“Although he was slowly bleeding through his wound, he showed no signs of massive blood loss from an injury to the heart wall itself.
“Sleep did not come easily. Next morning I rang a thoracic surgeon working in a large mission hospital – Tenwek – hoping he’d agree that a conservative approach would be OK. His helpful comment was that there was likely to be an injury to the right ventricle, currently clotted off, but with a high likelihood of a catastrophic re-bleed.
“Out here, over-the-phone advice and text books are really helpful. After a revision of cardiac anatomy and suturing techniques of the wall of the beating heart ‘…if bleeding is profuse, place a finger in the hole and suture around it carefully…’, another surgeon and I took him to theatre, opened the front of his chest and exposed the beating heart. There is nothing quite like it. Mine was beating faster than his, I can tell you!
“As we looked at the injury, actually at the more powerful left ventricle, we marvelled at how the attack knife had damaged the heart wall in between the two important coronary vessels. Hitting them would have given him an instant heart attack and probable death.
“By God’s grace he survived and was discharged a week later, the whole episode making him seriously stop and consider his eternal destiny.”
Medical ministry is a powerful tool in showing God’s love and reaching the unreached in Africa. For more information on opportunties in medical ministry contact AIM Australia. For more stories from AIM Australia, select the Resource tab at top of the home page.
December 2010
