Young Girl's Battle with Cancer
Soung Vanna first felt the pain in the back of her neck.
Then it spread to the back of her head, causing severe headaches that left her screaming in pain. By the time the 13 year-old had been taken to see a doctor in Phnom Penh, she already feared the worst.
?I was very afraid of what the doctor would tell me,? she recalls on being told that she had advanced tuberculosis and would need to be placed on strong medication to fight the disease. But after a month of taking the prescribed medicine, Vanna?s headaches had only become worse and she refused to continue taking them.
Concerned about their daughter?s deteriorating health, Vanna?s parents decided to take her to another hospital in Phnom Penh to get a second opinion. Following further tests, the doctors concluded that Vanna had something even more serious than tuberculosis. She had cancer of the lymph glands. more..
Medical Evacuations
People needing in depth medical diagnosis, or more specialist treatment
need to go to one of the hospitals in
Phnom Penh.
Dr Sophang alongside Ministry of Health workers assess patients for evacuation. Medical emergencies brought to the clinics over the weekend or in the evenings are handled by our emergency evacuation service.
Why A River Ambulance?
In February 2003 when visiting our clinic in Koh Keo village we arrived
to see a crowd gathered round a man on a bed. He
was very badly burnt and in a lot of pain. Two nights before he had accidentally spilt petrol on a gas light whilst he was filling
a machine to be used in the rice fields the following day. All the
family were badly burnt and his wife and 12 year old son had died
within a few hours, leaving him and another son alive.
We arranged for them both to be taken to the Boat of Hope on the river. After crossing the Mekong they would be met by our truck and taken to Phnom Penh. Whilst waiting for the truck it seemed that the boy died, but we were able to revive him. Finally, after what seemed such a long wait, the truck arrived and they started the long, bumpy ride back to Phnom Penh.
The truck was turned away from the first hospital it reached as they could not deal with burns patients. As the truck pulled into the second hospital the boy died. It had taken us too long, nearly 3 hours. The father received treatment and is now living back in the village, but he has lost his entire family.
As I heard the news about the death of the second son I thought, “There must be a faster way of evacuating people from our project area” , and so the idea of a river ambulance was born. With it, from the clinic in Koh Keo we will be able to evacuate very sick people to Phnom Penh in less than an hour.
Tuberculosis
A pioneer TB project that AOC started over 4 years ago has expanded to become a significant health care initiative in the area carried out in close collaboration with the Cambodian government.
AOC subsidizes a health worker for each of the nine communes in the Lvea Em district and a government officer to provide general oversight. The nine health workers make daily visits to each patient where they administer treatment directly. Multivitamin treatments and soya nutritional supplements are given to the more severely ill and undernourished. Patients requiring hospitalisation at the district hospital are given some financial assistance.
176 TB cases were diagnosed during 2004 and this project now runs with minimal supervision from AOC staff.
Children with TB symptoms are evacuated to the Kantha Bopha children's hospital in Phnom Penh. After patients are discharged, AOC provides financial assistance to enable carers to bring the children back to the hospital for the important follow-up visits.
Many lives have been saved through this project.