September 14

Another busy week. It tends to be very busy from Monday until Thursday then it gets better. However, this morning we had two big cases. While trying to reduce a girl’s arm fracture, the emergency bell went off. There was a woman in labour who delivered and lost 1 litre of blood. Thank goodness Dr.Valerie was there so that we were able to control the bleed. It’s scary looking at the gush of blood coming out. In about 10 days I will be on my own and I have to deal with all emergencies. I’m thankful that I had some time with an experienced doctor to learn from her. During the week we had a clinic and boy, it was like an ophthalmic (eye) clinic. All these people have something wrong with their eyes. There were a number of them who have this white/cloudy speckles covering part of their cornea. I have no clue what it is. It could be herpes infection but I saw like 3 patients like that and not entirely sure what it is. One of my babies died this week. The child was not as sick as the child I was worried about last week so I had hopes for this little one. The other child got dramatically better after putting him on TB medicine. Well, this one had oxygen like the other one, and also a tube into his stomach so that mom can express milk and we can pour medicine and milk down this tube. Well, mom did not listen to the nurses and decided to feed the expressed milk by mouth. Well the baby basically choked to death gasping for air I was told. The day when I admitted the baby I prayed for mom and baby so I thought she is now going to blame God for the death of her child. After wailing for a few hours over her dead baby, we moved her to a different room, and offered to pray for her and she accepted. I was very humbled. In the Western world, maybe the health professionals would have been blamed for the death.

I have learned to use the x-ray machine and the portable ultrasound. It's quite useful. The x-ray machine was broken for a while but now there's a new battery so it works. I can even process the x-ray films after taking it. The doctor here does everything.
It will be very useful for all fractures which we had two of last week. I'm quite happy putting someone in a cast now.
We have some rubbish plaster so this poor baby which I've been trying to straighten the foot, I had to try 7-8 different plasters before we got one to harden into a cast. Somehow the humidity had ruined some of these plasters. The humidity does amazing things. It has melted most of the contraceptive pills.
Oh, another thing I have learned this week is to anaesthetize a patient to fix a fracture. The drug we use is ketamine and it's one that is no longer used in the western world because it may cause nasty hallucination and disturbance when they awake from it. But it's quick and does not affect the breathing. They don't close their eyes on this anaesthetic and it looks very strange. A bit eerie I suppose. But works wonderfully