By Stella Damascus
I realised that Nigeria pays a lot of attention to specific vaccinations when children are born and our hospitals do not have the culture of going through files to know who and who is due for another vaccination. They just leave it to the parents, who may not remember or are not around, and in the process skip a very important vaccine for the child.
As exposed as a lot of us think we are, there are a lot of things that we do not know, or have heard of and are not sure exactly what they are. Most of the time, the problem we have in Nigeria as parents is lack of research. When it comes to making money, marketing and publicity strategies, we are on top of our game as regards research. The story is, however, not the same when it comes to health care. We usually leave that to the doctors and nurses who might not even be as informed as you might think.
Trust me, I know what I am saying because I have encountered a lot of medical practitioners who are not able to answer questions concerning different things like lupus and other forms of diseases that are not popular in West Africa. The fact that they are not popular does not mean that they do not exist among Africans. Well, that is another story entirely.
Back to the child I was talking about in the beginning, I saw this child in church on Sunday and she danced and played, even ate cake as it was the birthday celebration of one of the other kids in Sunday school. They all took pictures and generally had great fun. According to the family, she got home after church and was so tired that she fell asleep. Her mother left her to rest for a while but after three hours they thought it was unusual for her to sleep that much in the afternoon. So, the woman decided to wake her up but when she touched the little girl her temperature was so high that mother almost dropped her. There was fear all over the house because no one had ever experienced the kind of temperature the little girl had.
As it is with most Nigerians, when something like this happens, the first thing we think of is malaria which we always try to treat by ourselves by taking or giving medication we believe our bodies can tolerate.
The mother gave her something to reduce her temperature and some malaria medication, hoping that by the next morning, the fever will have been reduced.
Unfortunately, at midnight the child woke up screaming and the whole house ran to her and she was hallucinating. She said “the man is moving faster mummy please tell him to stop moving faster”. At that point her mother started crying. She got a towel, dipped it in cold water and put it on the girl’s body to bring down the fever which was getting worse.
The whole house stayed awake till 4 am when they decided to take her to the hospital.
When they got there, the receptionist took almost an hour trying to ask questions, calculate money for consultation and so on. After that, it was time to take vitals before going to see the doctor. The mother asked for a pediatrician and that was when she discovered that most hospitals don’t have resident paediatricians; they have consultants who come in at specific times on specific days.
They saw a doctor who admitted her and ran blood tests. Of course, you will find malaria parasite but the saving grace was a particular doctor who was very patient and made further investigations. He then asked for the child to be treated with heavy doses of intravenous antibiotics. After a few hours, the paediatrician finally came and asked some questions and noticed that the little girl could not get her chin to touch her chest. At that point, the girl’s mother was called aside and told that they will have to take a sample from the child’s spine because of a suspicion the doctor had.
That was the most painful extraction they had ever done, even for an adult, but the results came two days later. That was when the mother was told that her child had meningitis and it was close to the brain. The only reason that child did not turn into a vegetable and eventually die was because of the doctor who insisted the child be given antibiotics. But for that early treatment, the little girl would have died. The girl’s treatment was long and painful. It came with a lot of sleepless nights at the hospital and so much discomfort for the little girl.
The mother got the shocker of her life when the hospital started asking her questions about her daughter’s vaccination. When they asked her if she made sure her children took meningitis vaccinations, she said she didn’t even know there was a vaccination for that. She also discovered that there were some vaccinations her children should have taken at the age of five.
Some are taken after the age of ten and I am also aware that if any child seeks for admission in any school in the western world, whether pre-school, kindergarten, grade school, middle school, high school or even college, the parents must bring a form filled by a hospital telling them the child had taken all the shots. The hospital documents will also tell them about the child’s medical history and everything that concens the family’s health history.
It is very sad that ninety per cent of Nigerians pay attention to DTP, IPV, MMR, HBV and chicken pox. There are actually five more from what I have discovered, including the almighty HIB.
Please try to find out how many vaccinations your children have taken and how many more they have to take. Try and make sure your hospital keeps you up to date with your children’s medical history. You must also know what they are allergic to and what treatment they have had over time.
Anything that can get into your spine and then your brain can kill faster than even HIV.
Please let us all try to take our children’s health more seriously and I encourage you to find out about most of these immunizations, different illnesses that you can avoid, things your children should not eat or drink. Find out things you should look out for when you meet a pediatrician or go to a hospital that was recommended to you.
PM News
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