Scraped Knees
Her breathing came in ragged gasps as she begged passing patients for a sip of water. Her mother stayed day and night in the trauma unit. One in three people admitted to public hospitals last year died, the government reports. The number of operational hospital beds has fallen by 40 percent since just And as the economy fails, the country is running short on 85 percent of medicines, according to the national drugstore trade group.
Now you are seeing an implosion where people cannot get basic care. As the public school system collapsed , they sent her to a private Catholic preschool.
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As food grew harder to find, they made sure she had protein at every meal. When water began coming out of the taps with a foul smell, they boiled it before her daily bath. At the local clinic, doctors said she would soon be on the mend. Yet the fever kept rising, and her knee was swelling. So Maykol and Oriana Pacheco loaded her between them on their motorcycle and took off, determined to find a hospital that would take their case more seriously.
As shortages worsen, parents are giving their kids homemade medicines and food such as bitter yuca that can be toxic if not prepared correctly. With few supplies, doctors can do little but ease some of these children into death as painlessly as possible. There, the smell of religious incense hung thick in rooms of children with milky eyes and swollen heads.
SCRAPED KNEES [LIVE AT SMRUDNO] EP
There were no beds for Ashley. Men were lying mostly naked on the floor in the emergency room, IV lines snaking down from poles above them. There was no room for a sick 3-year-old. Maykol was growing desperate. Out of options, he turned his motorcycle toward University Hospital, once one of the best hospitals in South America but lately better known for gang shootings in the operating rooms and stickups in the stairways. They arrived around noon on a Saturday. Local production of almost everything has stalled, and there is little money to import medicine. The week Ashley was hospitalized, Maduro went on television and called on Venezuelans to start growing medicinal herbs.
The government has refused to let in humanitarian aid. So donations of medical supplies sit in warehouses and shipping containers in countries including the U. Stray dogs wandered the building, and cockroaches scuttled by on the walls. The water in the bathroom sometimes came out black. Doctors diagnosed her with a staph infection. Bacteria had entered the tissue near her knee, and were burrowing into her joint. Dazed, her father watched the green line on her heart monitor loop up and down.
He tattooed the names of his children on his arms, and stopped home every afternoon to have lunch with them. With the arrival of a third baby this summer, Maykol had quit his job as a sound technician and started driving a taxi to make more money. What would happen to that cushion now, he wondered? As night fell, Ashley got dramatically worse. The green heart monitor line began to zigzag wildly.
Her breathing sounded strange, like hoarse hiccups.
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And Maykol noticed with a start that her chest was moving the wrong way with each inhalation, collapsing inward instead of puffing outward. Doctors suspected bacteria had traveled from her knee to her lung and eaten a hole there. The X-ray confirmed their fears: With each breath she took, air was leaking into her chest, putting pressure on her heart. Back at the hospital, Ashley sounded like she was drowning.
Nightmare in Venezuela: How a scraped knee nearly killed a 3-year-old girl - CBS News
Her breath came in irregular gasps. Doctors looked for the apparatus that could save her: The hospital had a few, but they were locked away. Like all hospitals here, University Hospital has been pillaged, even by staff, as supplies become rare and valuable contraband. As night fell, they gathered around the crying girl and slid a large needle into her chest.
Air came whooshing out. Normally, medics would then insert a one-way valve, but there was none to be found. Doctors then called her parents out into the hall.
Then, in the hospital waiting room, they assembled a search team. They pulled in siblings, grandparents, aunts and cousins. Everyone was on their phones, calling people who might know where to find medical supplies on a Saturday night. Some accused her of looking to resell medical equipment.
No one was willing to help. Coming onto his shift Sunday, pediatric resident Richard Rangel approached his new patient with dread. He was thinking of quitting medicine. A thug had robbed him at knife-point in the hospital stairwell. And he had watched five children die of sepsis within a week because there was no way to treat them. Sprouting tubes and wires, Ashley looked like another desperate case.
Her leg had swollen to the diameter of a dinner plate and taken on an ugly purple tone. Rangel told her parents that if they could not stop the infection, surgeons would have to amputate. So her father joined the thousands of Venezuelans racing against personal clocks to save loved ones. He stood in hours-long lines outside pharmacies just to ask if they had what Rangel needed: The antibiotic vancomycin was the hardest to find. Doctors wrote out prescriptions on the back of bank statements and hospital bills because they had no paper.
The first requests were formal and typed, thanking the recipient for their help. Later, they were quickly scribbled. Maykol heard that a public hospital across town might have a supply. When he arrived, the pediatric unit had flooded. He waded through shin-high water to ask the pharmacist. In wet jeans, he rode to another hospital. Again, the pharmacist told him no. But as he was leaving, a man in a white coat pulled him aside and produced three vials from his pocket.
Maykol wrapped them in the prescription and took off for University Hospital, worried police might stop him, accuse him of trafficking and take the precious medicine away. In addition to medicine, Ashley now required surgery to drain her infected knee. Ashley needed an empty stomach for the operation. For two days she kept pleading for food and water. By Tuesday morning, she was begging to drink from the pouch of saline solution dripping into her arm.
In the meantime, a 4-year-old boy weighing just 13 pounds came into the emergency room. His family could not find rehydration solution, and the boy died 12 hours later. Maykol was out on his motorcycle when he got the call that Ashley had been booked for surgery. He began speeding down the highway and crashed into another biker, falling and bruising his shin. Bleeding, he continued to the hospital. She might walk with a limp, and one leg might grow to be shorter than the other.
Nightmare in Venezuela: How a scraped knee nearly killed a 3-year-old girl
But if the operation went well, she could still be a mostly healthy little girl. As she was wheeled to the operating room Tuesday night, Ashley asked her father for a hamburger. A whiteboard on the wall above the operating table listed the supplies missing that day: Two surgical residents sterilized a used needle and injected Ashley with anesthetic. Children Of Heck Sydney, Australia. Contact Children Of Heck. Streaming and Download help. If you like Children Of Heck, you may also like:. Delightful, freewheeling noise pop where clouds of guitar encircle heavenly, far-off vocals.
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