Early this morning about 3h30 or so, I woke up to someone pounding on our door and calling out to Taylor and I. I was still a little drowsy, but then I heard them say, “It’s Gay! I really need to talk to you guys!” So I went out there and let her in, and because my mind was in hyper paranoid mode, I locked the door behind her. She told me that she was sorry for waking me, but that she was in a tough situation because she found out that her flight home actually left later today in the afternoon. She started handing me things and telling me to please give them to this or that person, and asking me to tell so-and-so goodbye. Then she asked me if I remembered the woman she’d gone with for the weekend, and I told her I did. On Friday when we were at the clinic two men and a woman from the Sierra Leonean side of the organization that sent her met up with her and took her for the weekend to tour Freetown and Bunce Island. Gay told me that her relationship with this woman was a ‘little strange’ and that she was going to go to the police station early the next morning to speak on her behalf, so she had to go shower, change, pack, and go. I was really surprised, but too tired to really process anything, anything. And when someone wakes you up and seems frantic in the middle of the night, your mind goes into ‘emergency situation’ mode, so when I went back to bed I kept wondering if I’d remembered to lock the door after her and wondering if people were watching me through the windows and trying to get in the house.
In the morning I found out that Gay only told what was going on, she didn’t even tell Dr. ABD or Erdi. The matron asked me if I could wait until tomorrow to present CPR part two because Monday’s are normally very busy. Normally all the wards are supposed to report at Handover, but the nurse from Female ward showed up late and then didn’t come in, she just stood by the door and when the Matron dismissed everyone she ran off and left first out of almost everyone.
I decided to go to wound care and help Kady after Handover. Apparently over the weekend they ‘didn’t have time’ to do dressings for some of the people who have really terrible wounds that require daily dressings, so their wounds looked bad and smelled horrible. I told Kady on one of them that she needed to take over, but I had been doing them myself no that I’ve gotten to know how to do it. I mentioned it to Dr. ABD later, that some patients had gone all weekend without having their wounds cleaned, and he was a little upset by that. He took a quick look at the two patients that he’d done amputations on, one was to foot, and other was the toe, and both looked good. There weren’t any emergency surgeries, so Dr. ABD told us we didn’t have much left to see at the hospital.
After a quick lunch, we went down to the TFC and filmed our video on Family Planning. It was so funny to hear what the Creole translation of some of the information was. When they were talking about the different kinds of birth control that Magbenteh Hospital offers, Musa would end almost every explanation with, “You and you partner just enjoy you selfs, ‘n no worry about the pikin for come!” (Pikin means baby.) And then he would smile this little smile that was just so funny, like he was trying to say, ‘and you know what kind of enjoyment I’m talking about!’
After we finished that video, we made a video about antenatal care, which also went really well and we got Musa and Abi to translate for us. In the late afternoon we played about three rounds of euchre before dinner, which was really good! They have this strange fruit called breadfruit here that you can peal and fry and it turns out like French fries!
After dinner we were hanging out and Dr. Erdi came in and asked if she could get a couple volunteers to scrub in for a C-section, and Taylor and I immediately raised our hands. We all ran over to the theatre and I scrubbed in while Taylor helped the midwife. The baby was laying transverse, or side-to-side. It was very difficult to get the baby out, and they had to resuscitate the baby, but it started breathing fine after three minutes or so. Another successful surgery added to my resume!
This post is dedicated to a patient in male ward who died after severe typhoid. He had a laporotomy but not all repairs could be made, and he passed away shortly after receiving a blood transfusion.
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