Today Tanis and Elizabeth left to go back home, which meant that I needed to pack up to, because there are a lot of guests arriving this month so Dr. Erdi decided that all the Alma College girls could stay together in one of the doctor’s apartments, which has been empty since Saskia left. Saskia is a doctor from Holland who came with Dr. Erdi, but left last year I believe.
In the morning I did rounds with Dr. Erdi in children’s ward, which is always such an interesting experience. Sometimes when you ask a mother if their child has a fever they say yes even if they don’t because A.) they think that if he’s taking meds, it must be because he has a fever, and B.) if the fever is gone he wont get meds any more and wont get any better. They also just don’t understand the concept of telling the nurse their child has a fever when the fever is actually present, especially with night fever. Dr. Erdi and all the nurses tell all the caretakers repeatedly that when the child has a fever, you must tell the nurse right then, when they have the fever, and not later so that the nurses can measure the fever. But time after time the mothers say the child had a fever at night, and that they told the nurse, but the nurses notes clearly state that the mother didn’t tell the nurses until the morning, so when they took the child’s temperature in the morning they no longer had a fever.
At around 10h00 we all went to the house to say goodbye to Tanis and Elizabeth and hang out with them one last time. We also gave them our passports to get our stamps extended at customs and then have the driver bring them back. We have been assured that it’s safe to do so, but I’m still a little nervous about it.
After the girls left, I went into surgery to watch some procedures and I also scrubbed in on one today. The first surgery was a hernia repair for a young girl, which took all of about fifteen minutes. The second was a hysterectomy for a woman who had vaginal bleeding profusely. They weren’t sure what the problem was, but the decided that a full removal was really the only choice. Once they got in, it became clear that she had cancer that was terribly progressed. They finished the hysterectomy, but normally if they had known how far the cancer was they would not have put her through the agony of surgery, since they were unable to remove all the cancer and she will die anyway, but now she has to deal with recovering from an invasive surgery on top of that. The procedure was supposed to be about an hour and a half long, but ended up being three hours long.
The third surgery was a cystectomy for a woman who was told that the cyst wasn’t causing any problems and did not need to be removed, but who insisted on having it removed anyway. She was clearly very wealthy, and her family comes from the diamond mining area. I was able to scrub in, and it turned out to be quite an interesting surgery. First we couldn’t locate the cyst, but could see lots of little blood clots and little blood pools from infection that were probably very painful. When we finally located the cyst, it ruptured as we were trying to remove it. When it was removed and we were trying to close we had a heck of a time because she wasn’t responding well to the anesthesia and kept tensing and relaxing the muscles of her abdomen, making it difficult to sew her up nicely and prevent a scar.
After surgeries, I went and rested because I was so tired. We had a late dinner because we were hoping that the new students would arrive soon enough to eat with us. Fairly late, around 21h30, they arrived and had dinner. We were in the middle of watching Blood Diamond, which is about the civil war and the diamond trade in Sierra Leone. We decided to watch the rest tomorrow night so that the newcomers could get settled. They had a lot of questions about how things work here and the routine. The internet was down today, and it was down last night too, so I haven’t been able to post new blogs. We think it’s because of a big storm nearby yesterday.
This post is dedicated to the woman who died just as she arrived at the hospital with her family.
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