'Her blood-curdling screams filled the clinic'

By Roxy Photenhauer –

Our cold coffees were warming in Jamaica’s Caribbean climate when our peaceful start of a medical clinic was shattered the by screams of a 5-year-old girl brought in by her mother. The semi-conscious tyke had a 106-degree fever.

The Lighthouse Medical Mission team sprung into action, like they’ve done for 25 years in Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Guatemala, Burkina Faso and a smattering of other needy nations.

I was a senior at the Lighthouse Christian Academyon that mission. The life-threatening sickness jolted me out of a world of privilege. “Eat your broccoli, the rest of the world is starving,” was an annoying scolding from Mom. But now I was seeing the sobering reality.

The mother sobbed while Nurse Dal Basile attended to the little girl. On medical missions, teams don’t always have all the desirable equipment, so you have to improvise. That meant for me, a youth with no medical background, that I got to be the IV pole.

My dad has been a regular on Dr. Bob Hamilton’s twice yearly medical missions. There are doctors and nurses in the our church, the Lighthouse Church of Santa Monica, who almost never miss it.

My dad always came home telling the stories, some humorous, some harrowing. Now I have my own.

Our clinic was set up in a small church in a bustling capital city, Kingston. We had 17 people on our team, which slowly became 12-13 as people got sick or flew home. As I saw our numbers dwindling, expectations lowered.

The first day went surprisingly smoothly – it nearly made me second-guess how great the need was in Jamaica.

The next day, the desperate mother and baby came in.

It started as a serene morning, with nothing to complain about but our coffees rapidly melting in the island heat.

Within seconds, it turned into an extreme flurry of hands of people surrounding this frail little girl. She had a fever of 106 degrees and an unidentifiable lung disease.

She had been pulled out of her school at around 8:30 a.m. with delirium, shaking and nausea.

Like a sad magic trick, one of our medical tables was immediately swept clean of anything on it, making room for her miserable body to lay.

Being in a church and not a real medical facility, there was no pole for the IV to rest upon, so me and another team member held her IV ourselves for over an hour and a half.

This was an eye-opening moment for me. It gave me a literal bird’s-eye view of the terror in her eyes, and the snuffled sobs her mother was trying her hardest to conceal.

The little girl's blood-curdling screams filled the entire clinic with terror, until she started drifting into unconsciousness (or sleep?), which was infinitely more horrifying.

After an hour and a half of breathing treatments made for adults, and IV bags bigger than the little girl’s head, she didn’t seem to be getting better.

I was shocked at the calm, cool and collected demeanor that the doctors and nurses had throughout this situation, keeping the mother and, in turn, the daughter feeling safe under our care.

After administering emergency attention for an hour and half, the team paid for her to be sent fo a regular hospital emergency room.

There remained an eerie feeling in the air. Our attention turned to prayers and well wishes, melting coffees long forgotten. (We later learned from the hospital that if she had come to the clinic any later, she would have died.)

I have no medical training or background and had no experiences working with doctors or nurses. I’m just a high school senior who happened to be there, but the fact that I helped even in the slightest way, keeping this little girl alive, I suddenly understood why we were there.

Throughout the course of four days, we helped over 700 patients, with only two doctors present for most of that time. I witnessed children light up at the sight of stuffed animals and hygiene kits, elderly people freely given the medication they wouldn’t have afforded or had access to, and grateful mothers see their children given a second chance at life.

I will never understand the extent of the pain people in third world countries experience, nor will I comprehend why these things happen to undeserving people, but I have learned that where humanity exists, so does pain, but as long as pain exists, so does hope.

About the writer of this article: Roxy Photenhauer studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy.