Child's scraped knee a life-or-death matter in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela -- It was a scraped knee. So 3-year-old Ashley Pacheco's parents did what parents do: They hugged her, cleaned the wound and thought no more of it.

Two weeks later, the little girl writhed, screaming, in a hospital bed. Her mother stayed in the trauma unit. Her father searched Caracas for scarce antibiotics.

They had no idea how much worse it was going to get.

If Venezuela has become dangerous for the healthy, it is deadly for those who fall ill. After years of mismanagement and a plunge in the price of oil, the economy stalled. The socialist administration has refused to let in humanitarian aid.

Yet the government's reports say one in three people admitted to public hospitals last year died. The number of operational hospital beds has fallen by 40 percent since 2014. The country is running short on 85 percent of medicines.

A week after her fall, Ashley began to run a fever. At a clinic, doctors said she soon would be on the mend. Yet the fever rose, and her knee swelled.

So Maykol and Oriana Pacheco tried three other hospitals. None had the medicine or room to take Ashley.

The next morning, her temperature rose to 103 degrees. Her parents took her to a fourth hospital.

University Hospital was filthy. The staff ran out of bleach to clean the floors. Cockroaches scuttled by on the walls. The water in the bathroom sometimes came out black.

In Ashley's room, the sink was broken, and the soap and glove dispensers were empty. Yet her parents felt lucky she had been admitted at all.

Doctors diagnosed Ashley with a staph infection and gave her the last of the hospital's supply of vancomycin, a widely used antibiotic.

But she got worse. Her breathing sounded like gasping hiccups. Her chest collapsed inward with each inhalation.

Doctors suspected bacteria had traveled to her lung, but the hospital's last X-ray machine gave out the month before. So an ambulance took Ashley to another clinic, where the test cost a week's wages.

The X-ray confirmed Ashley's right lung had collapsed.

Doctors slid a needle into Ashley's chest to let out the trapped air. They told her parents without more antibiotic and a chest drainage machine, she wouldn't live to the next evening.

After midnight, a friend found the drainage machine at a private clinic. With it, Ashley started to breathe easier. But her leg had turned purple and swollen. If doctors could not stop the infection, surgeons would have to amputate.

The antibiotic vancomycin was the hardest to find. Maykol heard a hospital across town might have it. When he arrived, there was no medicine to spare.

He rode to another hospital. Nothing. But as he was leaving, a man in a white coat gave him three vials.

Ashley now needed surgery to drain her infected knee. Only two of the hospital's 27 operating rooms were functional.

Her doctors pushed until she was booked. Two residents sterilized a used needle and injected her with anesthetic.

But the next week, the fever was worse again. Soon, she was quaking under her sheets, with a fever of 106.

Red spots spread across her swollen skin -- the telltale sign of a heart infection. There hadn't been enough antibiotics to stop the staph bacteria from spreading.

Maykol spent August crisscrossing Caracas in his quest to find the drug. In the meantime, five other children died on the pediatric surgery ward due to the lack of proper antibiotics.

Finally, Ashley's fever subsided. Her heart was scarred, and she likely would need a valve replaced. Exhausted, her mother filed that information away for later.