my eyes were open the whole time

Since Raquel and the other medically-inclined volunteers have left, I was asked today to help with my first "medical" type jobs.

One of the Sisters pulled me aside during laundry into the med room area. Whoa whoa WHOA. I'm the girl that can't watch a full episode of Grey's Anatomy without closing my eyes. The morning was going to be interesting.

The first patient I helped with was this sweet, sweet little girl. She's probably about 7--a big change of demographic after working with the older women the past weeks.

Prem Dan is funny. Of the 200 beds in the women's ward, a good 100+ of them are for women who are very old and destitute. The rest are a hodge podge of either mentally or physically disabled individuals ranging from age 15 and up. I'm not sure how each has come to live in the home. Lots of random stories I guess. This little girl's was an interesting one.

She was getting her hands worked on by the nurses. I gathered that she had scabies on both her hands and lower arms. I think she was a little girl from the neighborhoods that line the perimeter of Prem Dan. The nurses told me her father had kicked her out of the home when she contracted the skin disease--and as if that weren't enough--sent her off by burning cigarettes in her palms. As a sort of punishment for getting sick...?

Her hands were in pretty bad shape and the nurses needed to clean all the little wounds. This meant lots of disinfectant. You know when a little kid falls off their bike and scuffs their knees and you have to put hydrogen peroxide on their cuts--the fight they put up. "No, no, not the stingy stuff." This was like that, but 100-fold worse. I was told to hold the girl down while they worked on her. She screamed and screamed. I had to put all my weight on her little body to keep her from bursting out of the chair. She cried and wailed and begged us to stop. I had to literally bear hug her to keep her from getting away. She was sweating all over the two of us--cheek to cheek. I felt so bad for her. Finally, finally the nurses stopped cleaning the wounds and started dressing them with ointment. This finally calmed her down. Later in the day she was smiling and giggling at the crows on the roof.

The next patient I helped with was also a hand wound case. This woman--probably mid-40's--had a severely mangled wrist. It looks like someone or something had tried to cut of her hand and the wound had been really infected while she was still on the streets. It turns out, one of the Sisters explained to me, the woman had been abandoned as a young baby once her family realized she was mentally handicapped. They left her, as a young toddler, on the streets. She grew alone on the streets and the traditional bangle that was put around her wrist as a baby slowly sliced through her skin and became embedded. She had to have the baby bangle surgically removed when she first came to Prem Dan. They say she's lucky she didn't loose her hand.

I helped change her bandages around the very messy, very raw, very open sore that was her wrist. She didn't cry and I didn't close my eyes.

Medical stuff I can do. Not well...but, I can do it. I learned that today.

Yesterday during lunch I went up to chat with Louise, one of my best friends amongst all the patients. She's 26 and, I think, mildly autistic. We've been reading Oliver Twist together to work on her English. She is so great. Louise asked me today where all the other Aunties were (she meant the Spanish volunteers--in India, Aunty is a term of endearment for women). I told her they left to go home. She got sad and asked me if tomorrow would be my last day. I sad, "Noooo! No. No. No. I'm here for about another 4 weeks!" She replied, "4ever!!??" "No, no, 4 weeks. Not forever. " She smiled and said, "That is good. And then you come back?" I told her, "Yes, I'll come back."