Saw a patient today with a hemoglobin of 1.9 g/dL. For context, a level that low is almost incompatible with normal consciousness, but she walked right into the clinic on her own feet.
For three long years, she lived with crushing weakness and since last 6 months breathlessness from just walking across a room. Why didn’t she get help sooner? At first, it was because the kids had crucial school exams and later her husband was reluctant to deal with the hassle of a hospital admission.
Her health was treated as a background inconvenience.
When we dug deeper, it got worse. A year ago, her Hb was 6.4 g/dL. A doctor explicitly told them she needed immediate admission. The family refused, walked out with a basic strip of iron tablets, she took them for two weeks, forgot about them, and nobody in the house ever bothered to check on her or remind her.
She didn't even come to the hospital today because of the air hunger. She came because her periods had completely stopped for months. Her body was so profoundly starved of iron and oxygen that it literally shut down her reproductive axis just to divert what little blood she had left to her heart and brain.
It’s completely heartbreaking. A woman will literally bleed her body dry, gasp for air for years and keep working silently, only to be brought to a doctor when her normal functioning stops.
Please check on the women in your homes. Stop letting them normalize chronic exhaustion.
We are proud to celebrate the launch of @WHO’s global CHW curriculum guide. Join this webinar, featuring Lwala's Sandra Mudhune, alongside govts, partners and CHWs, to discuss how to better support and integrate CHWs.
📅 April 15
🕒 2:30–3:45 PM EAT
🔗https://t.co/HDzL3u9PeZ
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept when it's no longer my circus, the courage to control the monkeys that are still mine, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Back in my day when you saved a document it would go a main folder called documents and you knew where it was because it was in the folder called documents