The hospital

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Well, today was my first full day at the hospital and it was very tiring. I woke up at about 8 or so and had breakfast and tea, which Shanta made. At about 9am we had morning rounds with Dr. Vimalesh, who took us around all three floors of the hospital ( I think like 60 beds or so) and along with Flora and Stephanie, all of the nurses from each floor went on rounds too, so about 10-15 people crammed into a hospital room, which are a lot smaller than hospital rooms in America. And the nurses are quite funny because they push in and out of rooms each time. In between each floor, we head back to Dr. Vimalesh's office to see outpatients. Usually there are two patients and some family members in the office, seated beside his desk on stools. They tell him their complaints and he nods his head, listens to their chest, looks at any tests that were done and then scribbles something down on their notebooks and maybe writes them a note for an x-ray or lab tests and they are finished. Privacy is not a concern at all in India like it is in America. Dr. Vimalesh is very informative through out rounds and often stops and tells us about the patients and their problems and we scribble them into our notebook and look up definitions in a medical dictionary. By about 11/11.30 we were done with all three floors and head back up to our apartment ( on the 4th floor of the new hospital building) to cool off and have some lunch.

We went to the basement of the hospital at about 1.15 to go to a class for the nursing students taught by Dr. Vimalesh. We were there for about 20/30 mins and learned a lot about how and when to administer a tetanus shot. All of the nurses are quite nice, asking me my name and where I was from and laughing a lot. It is quite a cheery atmosphere at the hospital and most of the nurses are around my age because by the time they turn 25 they get married and are house wives.

The rest of the afternoon we had free which was nice because it is so hot. From 2-4 a lot of people take time to have a siesta, so a lot of the shops close down. At about 5pm, we went on evening rounds with Dr. Rajulan, who is an ENT specialist. It was basically like morning rounds, but often there was different comments about the cases so it was very informative.

After rounds, I was exhausted! I had some dinner and watched a movie on TV (we have three movie channels in English!) before heading off to bed.

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