Breaking waves and bonds

Yesterday was an island of solid rock in a sea of chaos. Well, not exactly solid rock; at least slippery mud is better than breaking waves. Today, I'm afraid it was back to breaking waves...
Mondays are the "academic day" when we have lectures, study questions on the anesthesia textbook and resident presentations. The slippery mud was displacement from our usual room, malfunction of the powerpoint projector, six power outages with the replacement projector, and a twenty minute resident presentation that lasted forty five minutes. However, around 3:30 this afternoon, I would have given anything to go back to yesterday.
Today began with a difficult intubation in an uncontrolled hypertensive diabetic lady, followed by signs of angina on her EKG (later resolved, along with the angina I was experiencing! :-) I was called from that case to help with a patient whose airway was partially occluded by a malignant thyroid tumor. The surgeons had been unable to perform a tracheostomy and had given up, unfortunately leaving her in a very precarious situation and bleeding into her trachea. Next was a one month old with obstruction of his stomach, unable to feed and very dehydrated and weak. Just as that case was starting, a cardiac arrest occured in another operating room, and that is where I spent the next four hours, after doing CPR twice on the patient, who had severe injuries from a traffic accident.
This appears to me to be a typical day at the Kigali hospital, or perhaps I've had a string of bad luck. In either case, I continue to be amazed at the resilience and kindness of the staff who work there. The anesthetists are eager to discuss physiology, and their manual skills with IVs and intubations, spinals, etc are topnotch. They have completely accepted me, this unknown woman from America. They ask my permission (!) to give meds, ask how I would handle specific situations, and put up with my endless inquiries about drugs and supplies they don't have. They speak English for my benefit, since I am the only person in the room who doesn't understand either Kinyarwanda or French. We have formed a bond through suffering together several really tough cases.
Today, when we didn't have anything suitable to reduce the BP or nitroglycerin to treat the angina, I said to Francoise "at least we can pray." Later this afternoon Francoise was helping me transport the man who had survived two cardiac arrests. He came and said "let me help you. I think you are tired."
I was reminded of a sign we have posted in our study:
"Sometimes the Lord calms the storm; sometimes the Lord lets the storm rage and calms His child."