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Published: September 21st 2011
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Today was a great day in Africa! :-) Work was busy but so rewarding, honestly. We both had good days, and so did our patients! Raissa got another IV placed, I got to teach some docs how to do Saphenous sticks for the babies, and thankfully while I was teaching i was successful on the 1st attempts. I also let one of the interns teach me the incredibly scary but easy jugular stick. Basically they hang the child's head over to stretch the neck, find the external jugular vein, and pop a needle in. voila, blood draw. I just am not a huge fan of sticking any size needle into anyones neck, no matter how superficial the vein! anyway, I can now say I did it, and would be able to again if I needed. Watch out CH2 and CH3. Not like they would ever let me do it, but atleast I know I can. Next step, Raissa's turn :-) We are teaching the medical officers how to do blood draws our way too, which is fun.
my absolute favorite patient went home today...so happy for him, but I really miss him already. he is such a tiny 5 yr old!
(the little guy with FAS and a few congenital heart lesions). He was at Central Hospital for his cardiac surgery (AVSD repair and new mitral valve) and came back a week later his same old little happy self. I will admit I thought he might not come back. He ran right up to me when I was starting my rounding, since i'm on 8A now with the older kiddos. I was also teaching him some english. he learned apple, hello, bye, earrings (every day he came, hugged me, and had to check out which earrings I had on!), stickers, smile, etc... He also learned how to use my camera and I now have some awesome pictures from his level (mostly either finger covering, or peoples legs) :-) He had so much fun with it! He was also just a bit in love with stickers. once he figured out which pocket of my white coat I kept the booklet in...that was it. Check out the pics and you can see for yourself. Needless to say, we brought a lot of stickers from the states, and despite a daily occurence of sticker hand-out time we still have pages of them left! there
is still next week for a final sticker extravaganza though. Anyway, he went on one of the ministry of health transport buses back to his home village and I hope he will grow up and be ok. Raissa is now on the 8B ward and a lot busier there! on her 1st day got to do a full septic work up on a baby (LP and all)! Often that doesn't happen here, especially if they come in overnight, LP's, blood cultures, urine cultures almost never get done before antibiotics, if ever. We had a couple new rare diagnosis cases last week too, but I'll save them for some morning reports. Today was also a fun day because we gave out a bunch of stuff to the kids and mom's. we had little bags of washclothe/soap/toothpaste/toothbrush and gave one to each mom. We had a few disney princess toothbrushes and they were of course a big hit with the little girls! (these were all packed and donated through The Brown's church in the states). We also brought in some of our toys we had brought (sticker scenes, silly bands, mini beach balls, crayons, coloring books). The crayons expecially were the favorite. one little boy is going to be an amazing artist. He drew a perfect tiger! (which they actually don't even have in Namibia). We asked him if he wanted to be an artist when he grew up...his reply was a big smile and a "yup." We have to finish packing and get ready for a weekend in Erindi. Hopefully awesome pictures and stories from the safari adventure in a few days!
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