"We Are Managing" A Favorite Ghanaian Saying

 Scholar Athletes at the Savelugu School for the Deaf

With the help of Doctors Tuopar and Cammilari, maxillofacial surgeons from the United Kingdom, we reconstructed a young woman’s nose, which was damaged by an electrical burn. Some readers may find certain photos upsetting, so I will post one of her after she has healed. Her reconstructed nose is looking good and today she smiled for the first time. The defect caused her psychological trauma; perhaps her husband left her for he has not been seen.

The four-year old who ruptured his eye when he was run over by a motorcycle has done well and he now has vision in that eye.

Poverty makes work difficult. Tamale Teaching Hospital cannot afford to purchase alcohol for disinfection, to replace the broken bulb for our only operating room light, or to pay my nurses to travel to the schools for the deaf to take ear impressions in preparation to be fitted with donated hearing aids. Very poor patients who cannot afford the cost of the national health insurance do not receive any financial aid. When we request assistance for such a patient’s care, the social service department simply writes to benefactors asking them to help. I have seen this process to be successful only once.

Offsides! No goal.

Taking ear impressions for hearing aids for the children at the School for the Deaf

Nurses taking bilateral impressions quickly in the high tropical temperatures.

We examined 150 children at the Savelugu School for the Deaf and found thirty had stones, wax or foreign bodies in their ear canals.  Most of the children had hearing at birth and subsequently lost it which suggests malaria or its treatment as the cause. While at the school, I watched their co-ed soccer game and when an offside goal was scored with a resulting dispute, I ruled out the goal among cheers and cries of anguish depending on which side one was on.
Among the cases this week were the loss of a twenty year old man who died from septicemia resulting from a tooth infection and a four year old who sustained a ruptured eye globe when he was run over by a motorcycle. The medication necessary for the septicemia from the tooth infection was not locally available;  for the child with the eye injury, I did the best I could, because the ophthalmologist was away in Wa doing cataract surgery for people who are too poor to come to Tamale.