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Tanzania

Tanzania-how it started

So this is hopefully the beginning of my way to Tanzania.

The whole thing started almost a year ago when I fell out of my hammock. Dry rot, although everybody was thinking I was drunk, which doesn’t take much so I can’t blame my friends for thinking that….. But leaving your hammock out in the yard for three years will do it. Now what has a hammock to do with Tanzania you may ask? Let me explain! I ended up with numbness in my left shoulder, arm and fingers and after an MRI ended up in Dilan Ellegala’s office to be checked out. Even though the MRI didn’t show anything according to the radiologist, my PCP Kerry thought it would be a good idea to see a neurosurgeon. So there I was, in Dilan’s office. He showed me the MRI and the herniated disc. Wow… Not good. Anyway, we did talk about other stuff than my disc bulging out. Come to find out his wife is Dutch, like me. He gave her a call and handed me the phone. So here I am sitting in my doctors office, talking to another Dutch fellow woman in Charleston, SC. Then Dilan Ellegala told me about his organization Madaktari and I told him I would love to help him if he needed me too. I do have quite a bit of experience as a nurse, 21 years of pediatric nursing and now almost three years in the trauma center at MUSC.

Madaktari is an organization founded by Dilan Ellegala, MD. Go to madaktari.org and you can read everything about it. Also, if you do a search on Youtube it will show you an interview with him.

I went to nursing school in the Netherlands. After I graduated, I became a pediatric nurse, which in my home country means you go back to school for 13 months to learn how to take care of kids.

Ever since the attacks on the Kurds in the 80′s I’ve wanted to go and share my knowledge and experience in parts of the world that are not so lucky with good healthcare and peace. But a couple of other things came in between these plans…..I moved to the USA (NYC) in 1989 and then again in 1993 to Charleston, SC. I did a lot of other things, besides moving to the South East of the US from Amsterdam, an accomplishment by itself because talking about different cultures!!! I worked in the Neonatal ICU for about 4 years. Then I became a pediatric flight nurse for about seven years. And then, after a very difficult time in my personal as well as my professional life and almost giving up being an RN altogether, I took the plunge into something completely new for me: working in an adult ER. Phew, talking about shock! The first time I assisted with resuscitation was quite the experience for me. For all you non-health care friends, IV needles come in colors. The color tells you the size. Now keep in mind I worked with kids for 21 years…. smaller than adults, right? So smaller veins…smaller needles…. Just to explain the following conversation that took place between my colleague and me….. Raul: “What size needle did you put in Hanneke?” “I don’t know Raul, it is green!!!!” Now, after this event, Raul gave me an vial of epinephrine, a drug used in resuscitation. I looked at this humongous thing, one whole milligram, and looked back at Raul. Who told me: “yes Hanneke, the whole vial! Just push it!” And so I did, in the mean time thinking: “I just resuscitated a whole NICU with this amount of drug….” And that was the beginning of me becoming an adult RN. Almost three years later and still loving it!

Now my story continues. After surgery and recovery, the whole Tanzania thing stayed in my mind, coming up to the surface once in a while. When I bumped into Dilan in the ER a couple of weeks ago I asked him how things were going with it and if he still would like me to go. He gave me the phone number and email address of one of the other nurses that will go and she and I met at Sette in Mount Pleasant to talk about it. Okay, so this makes me feel rather old…..Ginny was born a year after I graduated nursing school!!!!!! Yikes!!!! But wonderful!

Now the next step is going to be to be able to get the time off from work to go in October of this year. I talked to my nurse manager last Friday and am waiting for her to get back to me about this. Since I am a so-called ‘work weekend only’ or ‘WOW’ employee this may be the tricky part. WOW means that for extra money you work every weekend but four a year. It used to be that the contract was renewed every six months but last year that was changes into every three months. This makes it somewhat harder to take time off, since instead of two weekends off every six it now is one every three. Harder to stack them up and take longer periods of time off….

Hopefully there will be a way to get around this, so keep your fingers crossed!