Today I discovered that it requires four reminders for nurses to get blood for a surgical patient at the doctor’s request. The work ethic of some of the locals here just astounds me. After Handover, we discovered that Hasinatu had been arrested when she arrived at the hospital that morning, and was being taken back to Bo to her husband. Apparently she left him without his consent and he did not want her to go to work, so he had her arrested. Dr. Erdi was fairly upset that such a thing was allowed to happen, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.
I had hoped to help with wound care again today, but no one could find the keys to the theatre so I went to find Dr. ABD and follow him on rounds. He however was busy giving a tour of the hospital to some friend of his and after he told me he’d be right back, and I waited outside the female ward for ten minutes, I decided to go down to the TFC to weigh myself (I’ve lost two more kilos) and then head back to the theatre to see if they had gotten in and started wound care yet.
I found that they had started wound care, and I helped Kady with that until around 11h00. Taylor joined me around 10h30 because Dr. Erdi had gotten called into an interview with a lab technician, and we are in dire need of one so she jumped at the opportunity to find one.
After working on my project and having lunch, I went back to the theatre, where I was told that they would be starting surgery soon. This was at 13h00, but they didn’t start until 14h30. Sometimes things just take way longer than they should here.
In the mean time, I found Dr. Erdi finishing rounds in the maternity ward, and joined her in time to hear that a baby who weighed 4.8 kg at birth weighed 3.6 kg when they measured here today, just 48 hours later or so. Dr. Erdi looked at me, and I said what she had written all over her face. “That’s impossible. The baby looks healthy and normal, and a healthy baby does not drop 2.5 lbs over night!” All the nurses laughed, and when Dr. Erdi finished seeing that patient, the patient said, “Thank you, sir!” Dr. Erdi looked back and told her, “I’m a ma’am, not a sir!” Which prompted all the nursing staff to tell Dr. Erdi that the patient made that mistake because being a doctor is ‘man’s work.’ I told them that’s ridiculous, but they couldn’t be convinced.
Around 14h30 surgery started with appendicitis, then a cystectomy on an elderly woman. The woman looked very normal, a little chubby for a Sierra Leonean maybe, but she looked just fine. When they opened her, Dr. ABD pointed to an egg sized yellow and milky mass and said that it was the cyst, and a large one. Then he pulled out the rest of the organ it was attached to. Or that’s what I thought until he cut the entire mass out. I was so surprised until I realized that it was all cyst that he had removed, and it was about eight inches long, five inches wide, and four inches thick. When they cut it open, most of it was filled with brown fluid, but part of it was partially formed tissue, which is a bad sign. Such cysts are normally indicative of cancer.
After one final procedure, which was just a vaginal exam, Taylor and I went back to the house to plan our videos some more. We barely got started when Dr. Erdi came by asking if we wanted to go to town with her to pick up some things. We all ended up going, and while Dr. Erdi was in a small shop buying some things for the guest house I took the girls down the street to Foday’s woodcarving shop to show them what he had. He remembered me, and the girls enjoyed looking at all his things. None of them had any money, and we told them that we would be back sometime to look again. After we left the girls asked if Ali, another wood carver I know, makes the same kinds of things. They decided that I should give him a call, and ask him to bring some things by for them to see. I think I’ll ask him to come by sometime next week.
This post is dedicated to a child who died of severe malaria today.
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