Our little Brynnie has had a fever for a day and a half now. It is fairly high and yesterday Tylenol didn’t bring it down a whole lot. Thankfully a nurse lives next door to us and checked her out. We’ve done a blood slide to check for malaria and today we will bring it to the most reliable slide checker in Sentani. There are other places but the accuracy rate is not that great. The other day they said a woman didn’t have malaria whereas the more accurate woman said she did. Normally you can have false positives but false negatives are strange. So that’s the kind of thing we deal with here. Medical care in Indonesia is not great. Thankfully there is an American doctor here in Sentani and another one in Wamena, a large interior city. There are also a bunch of nurses from America and Australia and they do a great job keeping everyone healthy. They run a clinic up at the international school. Their main job is keeping the students healthy but anyone else from the expat community may go there as well. The one thing that is really lacking here though, is a good lab. To give you an idea of how hard these ladies work to keep everyone healthy, they actually have bird flu vaccine ready in case there’s a break out.
Mikah is also home from school today as she has a bad cold and yesterday had mild fever. Hopefully tomorrow she will be able to return to school.
Never a dull moment!