Best day thus far

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Today was... Awesome. Where to start... I got up around 430am and went with brook, one of the other girls here, for a run. We jogged down to the coast and did sit ups in the grass by the beach... Awesome way to start your day. My endurance is complete crap right now because of my lack of nutritional intake but it still felt good to get my heart pumping a bit. After that we came back and had crepes for breakfast, by far my FAVORITE thing in Ghana. Awesome. I'm also addicted to this chocolate drink you add to boiled water to make hot cocoa- it's Called milo and I got to have some if that for breakfast... Good start to the day. Clinic in the morning was pretty standard... Lots of malaria and typhoid as always. My two favorite nurses were on today... Christie and Sauda. Christie is the sweetest person youve ever met, and she ALWAYS blasts either Ghanaian music or miley Cyrus hits from her cell phone. Sauda is the equivalent of our charge nurse. She's been there for three years and has the most experience. For lunch, we usually have typical Ghanaian fare made by our cook benedicta. Instead, today we had made plans to meet up with Mary, a peace corps volunteer who has been placed in senya as well. She's been here for three of her 27 months so far and seems to be doing well. We got "fufu" for lunch at a local chop bar. Fufu is made by mashing up corn and cassava, a local root plant, in an enormous mortar and pestle type of instrument. It is served in a bowl with hot spicy soup poured over it. The corn an cassava ball resembles a ball of uncooked dough. You dip your hands into the fufu ball and scoop up some soup and put it in your mouth to eat- but you're not supposed to chew it. Sounds super gross but I actually really like it! At least it's filling... And not rice! After lunch we went back to the clinic and I delivered a baby (with the help of a midwife, and Sam, a volunteer oncology nurse from Canada). They seem to think that we know what were doing in terms of midwifery, which could not be farther from the truth. Sam is also 24 and didn't even have a maternity rotation in college, and I haven't worked with a pregnant patient in about 4 years... The Birth itself went fine, but the mother neglected to mention her past medical history of post partum hemorrhage. Not a good situation. We don't have blood transfusions here so we gave her clotting medications through an iv and I literally was squeezing bag after bag of ringers lactate by hand into her peripheral iv to try to keep her pressure up. Eventually it became apparent that we were not going to stop the bleeding so her family arrange for a cab to take her to the nearest hospital 30 minutes away. We laid a tarp down in this cab that was literally falling apart. None of the good cabs wanted to take her. She laid down in the back seat on the tarp, and Sam, another nurse, and one of her family members squeezed into the back seat with her. I handed over the 20 minute old baby girl to her mother in the front seat and they set off for winneba. The most hilarious part of this story is that apparently, they stopped at not one but two vendors on the way there to get coca cola for the family and staff in the car... While she was hemorrhaging on a tarp in the back seat. Seriously? In case you were wondering, both Mother and baby are fine. Unbelievable. After Sam left in the cab, I went back to the clinic, where one of my patients with typhoid proposed to me multiple times. Very annoying as his infusions took several hours so I had to keep turning him down. My other patients thought it was hilarious. Went home after clinic and made MU FAVORITE DISH for dinner, ground nut soup with rice. Only took me like two hours to make it! And we had pineapple today- today was such a good eating day! I wasn't even hungry it was so great. After dinner the kids were pretty rowdy so we had a 2 hour long dance party to some Ghanaian music that a neighbor played through a giant speaker system. These kids are such good dancers. They have been trying to teach me but my efforts are pretty pathetic. I was so hot after dancing for two hours that I had to dump a bucket of well water over my head. I'm exhausted but today was awesome. Much needed because this past week was a bit rough in terms of being extra hungry and tired. Will try to write more later!

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