Today we are traveling with one of the rehabilitation outreach teams to the Song Ma Leprosarium in the northern mountains near the border with Laos. We sit closely packed in the back of the old jeep of the provincial health service. There are five of us: Thanh, the prosthetic technician, Huong the eye doctor and two physiotherapists Thuy and Dan. We are all from the General Hospital in Hanoi.

Jan Robijn continues his narration, in this part 2, of his series of articles describing the work of his team in Vietnam. 

We drove all day yesterday from Hanoi to this remote province and got up early this morning to drive the last three hours to this centre where more than 100 disabled ex-leprosy patients are living together with their families. Nearly half of them have had an amputation and their prostheses need checking regularly. The rest need to have their deformed feet and orthopedic footwear regularly checked. All of the people in this centre practise self-care, which is really important because it prevents blisters or small wounds on their feet getting infected, which could eventually result in an amputation of the foot.

As the jeep is arriving at the central courtyard of the Leprosarium we see a group of people soaking their feet in wash-bowls. Every morning they come together here to soak and check the skin of their feet for cracks or small wounds. They prefer to do that as a group and not alone at home. We walk over to say hello and see if there is anyone with a new wound. But that is unlikely. Although all of them would have had several wounds in the past, good self-care has made them a rarity nowadays.

Because there are no new wounds, we turn our attention to the main work of this morning: the prostheses, or to be more precise, the people who use prostheses. During our last visit, three months ago, we fitted seven people with a new prosthesis. Thuy and Dan, the two physiotherapists, see them first to make sure that they are walking well and are having no problems with the skin of their stumps. Then we check the other amputees, while Thanh is starting to repair some of the prostheses.

Dr Huong uses most of the morning to see people with eye problems. They need to do self-care too to prevent more serious problems developing to their eyes. Some of the eye problems need specialist care. Some of them will need surgery at the provincial hospital, including a few elderly people with a cataract. Although this eye problem has nothing to do with leprosy and is due to old age, we still make sure that they will be seen by the provincial eye department and that they will get surgery to prevent blindness.

With that, the morning and our visit have come to an end. For lunch we quickly eat a bowl of Vietnamese soup and then say our goodbyes until our next visit in some months' time. What happens in the afternoon we will tell you in Part Three of 'A Day in the Life of NLR Vietnam'.

Contact: Jan Robijn nlrvietnam@hn.vnn.vn 

 

Category: Field Activities