The week started with a number of us struggling with recovering from the virus that has been doing the rounds. The hospital was thankfully fairly quiet for a few days. It was Dr Sharon's birthday, so in the evening we had a meal at one of the family's house and had cake etc, which was nice. There was also some drama upon discovery of a snake on the veranda! I was assured it was a non-poisonous variety, but I think it is the only snake I have seen outside of a zoo! In other wildlife news, we currently have a rat in our house, which ran in front of me last night! There was also a MAMMOTH wasp inside earlier, which I successfully herded out the window!
On Tuesday afternoon I took some stuff to the hospital to do some simple craft with some of the kids. Some of them have been staying at the hospital for ages, and there's hardly anything to do. So they were pretty chuffed with paper chains and chinese lanterns and things. I also decided that it counted as simple dexterity physiotherapy for the boy recovering with his buruli ulcer deformity!
On Tuesday night, the 17 year old boy who had come before the weekend with the pig-hunting foot injury was sent back to us! The hospital we'd sent him to hadn't operated because they didn't have an anaesthetist, so they sent him to us. We don't have an anaesthetist either(!), but the doctors do certain things from the textbooks. So the surgeon came on Wednesday to do the foot amputation, and I assisted! Lots of tying off vessels before getting to the bones, then making sure the stump was as good as possible. It was done under spinal block, and the sedation wore off just in time for him to be a bit too awake for my liking for when we were sawing off his bones! A couple of times I just thought about what we were doing, which was pretty crazy! See picture below.
I went straight from the hospital for dinner at the house of the MAF pilot and his wife, which was nice. Their little boy (18months) was pointing out photos of aeroplanes to me and correctly identifying different models! I managed to skype with my family when I got back, which was really nice.
Yesterday (Thursday) I assisted with another emergency c-section for a breech baby. It was another difficult surgery (not least because the spinal block didn't work very well). Another few patients from the other hospital came to us (because with the surgeon now on holiday, they currently have no doctors), including a 7 week old dislocated shoulder....thanks for that! Also a man with multiple pig-bite wounds. The doctors stayed late to sort him out a bit, while I looked after the missionary family kids, so their mum could go to a meeting. We went down to the river, which due to hardly any rain recently, looked like this:
Local people are getting a bit worried by the lack of rain now, as their tanks are running low and they are having to dig wells and walk far to get water.
It turned out that the pig-wound guy's surgery took a turn for the dramatic as he kept stopping breathing. So the surgery was abandoned, and I helped to sort out one of his arm wounds this morning under just local anaesthetic. His wounds initially didn't look too bad, but pig tusk wounds often have more damage deep inside, and we were repairing a cut tendon.
My other major task today was going through the medicines in the emergency box and in theatre, noting how out of date they are, and seeing if there are any more in-date ones in the dispensary! Welcome to Jungle Medicine!
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