Nadia

I spent quite a bit of time with Nadia today.  (And I have the back-ache to prove it!  Since she was facing the wall, I hunched over the head of her bed, until my colleague Pat Quinn suggested that I pull out the bed and put a chair next to her head so she could see me.  D'oh!  Why didn't I think of that?)

Nadia is such a sad case.  She is like a stick figure, just skin stretched over bones.  She has some awareness of her surroundings, it seems, though I haven't picked up on anything I'd call cognitive ability.  The staff described her as "paralyzed" and epileptic.  I wonder if she doesn't have muscular dystrophy, but as I have told some of you before, in Romania they don't diagnose things down to the molecular level like we do in the United States.  If you're paralyzed, you're paralyzed, and it doesn't much matter if it's cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy or something else.  They'll just work really hard to keep you comfortable.

I had thought that Nadia might like a lollipop (a popsicle being unheard-of here), and after trying three supermarkets I finally found one in the kiosk right at the hospital gate.  I wet it first, then put it up to her lips until she got the idea and licked it (sort of).  She really liked it, but tired of it after a while.

A couple of the nurses came up to me and said, nu, nu (no, no).  I thought they were telling me not to give it to her, and I was telling them that I'd hold it so she wouldn't choke, and it was such a little bit of sugar it couldn't hurt her, etc., until they said OK.  This happened twice before I realized that they were telling me nu, nu because Nadia won't eat and they thought I was wasting my time.  Once I showed them that she was licking it (sort of), they said, da, da -- meaning, yes, yes, great, she's eating something.  (You might wonder why this child isn't on a feeding tube or IV fluids or something, but remember that Romania is a poor country, and this is the poorest part of a poor country, and these things just aren't possible.)  I am going to bring her another lollipop tomorrow, in another flavor and see how she likes it.