Dominican culture stems from both Spain and Africa. Therefore, the predominate religion is Catholism combined with African rituals. There are so many kids we see each day because they took an overdose of some tea or drink due to a religious ritual. One girl we began to see earlier last week. She was almost comatose, opened her eyes sometimes when we asked her to, had no visual tracking and could not move her body consciously. When we walked in the room on Monday, she was sitting up in bed, talking and was able to walk a little bit with us. It was so amazing to see the drastic change in her condition.
On a sadder scale, there were 2 kids who also had toxic poisoning. As we walked into the ICU today, the doctors and nurses were surrounding this one girl who was barely had a heartbeat and was dying. As we were looking at the scene, we noticed the other boy lying next to her was staring off into space as blood was trickling out of his mouth. His monitors were turned off and no one was even paying attention to him. We notified the nurse who had someone attend to him as she told us that both were internally bleeding and going to die. We just stood there, feeling helpless, knowing that all there was nothing that we could do. I will never forget that far off look of this alone little boy as the blood fell from his mouth and the helplessness that I felt along with it.