Memento mori

I was just getting used to people not dying.

We had gone by for almost 2 months without a death.

Now we have had three of them.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

One man had a horrible side-effect to his anti-retroviral drugs. Tragically he did not take it seriously - thinking everything would work out ok. He ended up on a ventilator - and then he was just too weak. A tragic wasted life.

Another man was brought to us with severe seizures. He had been hiding his HIV status for years - and was even asked by sympathetic church leaders about it - but he denied having HIV. We were unable to care for his severe situation in our set up and so had to refer him to the main government hospital. He died.

Probably most unexpectedly was a Nepali lady who we have known for some time. She was on ART but since she has HIV2 - which is not very susceptible to the normal HIV meds - she was getting her medication from an organisation called MSF. She died in a road accident. She was crossing a busy intersection (just 300 m from our office) when a motorcycle knocked her down into the path of a bus. A section she had probably crossed hundreds of times before. Spot death. ART does not protect you from rash driving.

3 lives gone. It leaves a hole in us. People that we knew at various levels.

How faint the outlines of our lives are - how thin of skein stretches across the door-step to eternity.

Memento mori.