Minor Surgery!

Warning! The picture and description below may be a little graphic if you don’t like blood.

In May, we saw a patient in the clinic that had been in a work accident involving dynamite. When he came to us, he was missing 2 or 3 fingers on each hand, had burned corneas and was unable to see, and had traumatic injuries to his arms, chest, and face. His wounds were all badly infected.
This week, he returned and is doing better. His infections are gone; however, when he went to the hospital after his accident, they just stitched him up and didn’t check his wounds, leaving pieces of wood from the explosion embedded in his arm, chest, and face. On Tuesday, we removed a small piece from his arm and on Wednesday, we performed minor surgery on his chest to remove an inch and a half piece of wood that was embedded in his muscle.
This was such an exciting (but nerve wracking) experience for me! I don’t want to be too graphic, but I was able to actively help (including sticking my fingers into his chest to probe for the wood). In addition, I feel like I’m finally getting to the point where I know a good portion of the medical vocab (and non medical vocab) that we use and can understand almost anything that she tells me to do.
After she finished with the sutures, the doctor briefly told me how to clean and bandage his chest, told the patient and his wife that she was late for a meeting, but was leaving him in capable hands, and turned and ran out. I tried to answer their questions as best I could, but had to laugh to myself. Can you imagine if that had happened in the US?
It has been amazing to work with a Christian doctor. We were having a lot of difficulty locating the wood and she began to pray out loud that the Lord would guide her tools.
Please pray for this man and his family as he still has a long, hard recovery ahead and is still in incredible amounts of pain, plus, he earns his living with his hands and eyes. In each encounter with him, he and his wife have been laughing and joking and he told the doctor that he was a Christian. This has been a great witness to me, reminding me that the Lord is faithful no matter what the circumstances.














Here is a picture of the piece of wood that we pulled out of our patient's chest.