Change of Scenery

Peter, the 12 year old from Cheryl’s Children’s Home who has cancer (see pictures in previous post), has been going for chemo once a week for the few weeks. Just about 3 weeks ago after one of his chemo treatments, he came down with pneumonia he had to stay in the hospital for a week. He has been responding to the treatment quite well, although his white blood cell count has been low for the past two weeks. It was .3 last week so he had to go and get shots once a day for five days.

Kieren, the project manager at Cheryl’s is going back to the UK on Thursday morning until March 21st to try to raise more funds for Cheryl’s and to try to find some donors to help pay for Peter’s treatment. Dre, another volunteer at Cheryl’s who has been here for almost 6 months is leaving on March 1st, and since there is no one else who can devote as much time to taking care of Peter right now, Kieren asked me to move out of my little hut I share with Chris and into his house with Peter and one of the other older boys, James, while he is away. James finished form 4 (high school) at the end of 2009 and is still waiting to get the results of his exams. Lilian, the oldest girl at Cheryl’s is in the same position and has been sharing the responsibility of spending the nights at the hospital with James. Kieren decided that it would be best for Peter to be in a more contained area for a while to see if that would improve his health. My role the next few weeks is going to be to look after Peter and make sure that he is taking his medicines, eating correctly, making sure he gets to the hospital on time, talking to the doctors and finding out how he is doing, do the food shopping for the house, and paying the hospital bills.

Usually Peter gets chemo every Wednesday and stays the night and is then discharged Thursday afternoon but this week because one of his doctors is not going to be there on Wednesday we went to bring him today. His white blood cell count is still low so his doctor decided to wait another day so that it would be 7 full days in between treatments. After spending all morning and part of the afternoon in the hospital and meeting all the doctors and getting myself acquainted with the lay-out of the hospital we made our way back to the house. The hospital he is getting treatment at is Aga Khan University Hospital but in two weeks his is going to have to go to Nairobi University Hospital for radiology treatment, so we went there to see the department and to find out how much the treatment is going to cost. For a week of treatment it is going to cost 25,000-30,000 shillings ($330-395).