Project on its way!

Hello again,

We continue to follow a few regular patients at the center (clubbed feet, polio like the little girl you see in the picture on the left who is about 5 years old) but last Friday finally started our project! We selected the patients we wanted to follow for the next six weeks (its suppose to be 8 weeks but because of the wonderful professeur things were a little slow to start....). Anywho, we chose children between 7 months and 24 months who have motor developpemental delays. We also chose them according to their nutritional status (we took M2, moderate malnourished and M3, severely malnourished). We have 6 children each and we gave the mothers a little card saying when to come (they all come twice a week in physio without any fee) and they come everyday to the CREN to get weighed, fed and checked. The girls take extra measurements once a week with those children (circonference brachial, perimetre cranien, taille, etc).

Today (Monday) was our first day and things went pretty well. We evaluated their motor status and will reevaluate at the end to see if they have progressed a little. 6 weeks is very short to see a change but its better than nothing and the mothers can see what we encourage so they might do it at home as well. We initially wanted to take less than 12 active patients because we also wanted to have a group that we evaluated at the beginning and at the end without seeing them in therapy... but we decided against it because its quite hard to decide not to help those little babies.... So we are actively following 12 children.

Oh one major difference is that the babies here don't have diapers (I think I mentionned it in another entry), so 2/3 of my patients today peed on the mat.... Lovely. Also, children here aren't use to playing with toys nor to be stimulated so we are going to focus a lot on that.

We sent one of Melanie's patient ( 7 months I believe) back home to rest because she was having lots of diarrhea. You can tell she was pretty malnourished by the brittle hair, the tube in her nose, her lips were all dried up, she seemed very drousy and energy level was very low. I hope she will recover, for severe diarrhea in small children can be fatal pretty fast....

So to sum up, things went pretty well, quite different from home and it is hard to communicate with the mothers who mostly don't speak French. However I now know the days of the week to remind them when to come back in physio. Anyways, hopefully it will continue to go smoothly.

Enjoy the pictures!