Guyana housecall

Joanne Perry

Every year for the past 15 years I have traveled to Third World countries with Remote Area Medical Volunteers Canada. Our mandate is to provide health services to extremely remote areas where access to medical care is minimal.

Last February we journeyed to South America to the Pakaraima Mountain district of Guyana, “Region 8,” one of the poorest areas of Guyana. Our team of 10 Canadian health care workers hiked village to village over 2 weeks providing medical, dental, and optometric care to 6 communities. Local porters, or drogeurs, as they are called in Guyana, transported our food, medical equipment, and personal gear.

We were a cohesive, hard-working group keen to trek in a remote area of the world. We set up clinics in villages. Many individuals needing new glasses, to have a sore tooth extracted, or medication for various ailments lined up and received treatment.

In one village, at the end of a long day, I noticed a girl, perhaps 10 years old, standing, patiently watching, as we ate supper at a table borrowed from the village sewing centre. An isolated village that is a 2-day walk from an airstrip and access to the outside world means a group of Canadians arriving to run a clinic is an event. Typically, an audience of children and adults observed our activities, whether we were preparing meals, doing yoga, washing clothes at the local creek, or seeing patients. I paid little attention to this young girl because I assumed she was simply observing. However, darkness descends quickly that close to the equator, and it eventually occurred to me that she was alone in the dark and did not seem to want to go home. I went over and asked if we could help. “My mother has pain,” she almost whispered, her eyes directed to the ground. I asked her where her home was. “Not far,” she replied. In Guyana, that could mean 5 minutes away, or an hour away. We were destined for a housecall.

Immediately, the team mobilized. Nurses rifled through medical bags hunting down basic medications and equipment. Other members prepared to join me on the trek.

The young girl led us along a path leading out of the village. I tried to plan for what we might encounter. On previous trips, similar requests had led to many different scenarios, some of the more serious including a woman with postpartum hemorrhage, a 3-day-old baby with sepsis, and a teenage boy with an acute abdomen—and these did not always have happy endings. My relief was intense when only a few minutes later we arrived at a thatched-roof shack without walls to meet a woman we had seen in clinic a few hours earlier. Her husband and 5 other children surrounded her. She sat on a wooden bench with her foot elevated, her head twisted down in pain. Earlier we had dressed a large ulcer on her foot and wrapped her leg in a compression bandage. Leg swelling and pain now consumed her. We loosened her bandage and provided analgesia. Easy treatment; satisfying for all involved. The woman was left to mend, her family reassured, and my fellow team members and I were spared the trauma of a situation that could not be addressed with our available resources in a remote setting.

This experience gave me pause. How difficult it must have been for that young girl to approach a group of strangers to try and petition help for her mother. It was moving to see all 6 children hovering over their mother as we assessed her foot. The older daughter who had approached our camp held the youngest baby on her hip. This family, living in abject poverty, sleeping in hammocks exposed to the outside world, was driven to support one another as best they could. Over the past 15 years, a universal theme of families helping and protecting one another has emerged in each country I have visited.

This housecall also reminded me how essential it is to work as a team in health care. I was the physician who examined the patient’s foot and leg, but supplies were prepared for me, lights were shining so I could see, and my safety was enhanced by our travel as a group. Such journeys into isolated areas of the world remind us how we can still assess and treat many illnesses with minimal technology.

Ultimately, even as physicians continue to seek work-life balance on a day-to-day basis, medicine will continue to call us at unexpected times and in strange circumstances—such as my nighttime housecall in the jungle in Guyana.