Yet Another Day at the Hospital

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Today I spent another day at the hospital. In the morning we saw a hydropressure reduction procedure for intussusception in a young child (basically they use water pressure to pop out the telescoping intestine and monitor via ultrasound). Dr X was working on this for his PhD thesis and is a novel way of treating intussusception.

Yesterday, I was talking to the head doctor and asked whether he had some walls to be decorated in the hospital, so we came up with the idea to paint the walls of one of the private rooms (cabins) to something more cheerful for sick children. I'm not much of an artist but fortunately one of the Ottawa group, Erik, is. Today we picked out the pictures we'll paint on the wall; Disney themed — Aladdin (Genie and The Carpet), Beauty and the Beast (Lumiere and the Clock), and the Lion King (Timone and Pumba). Hopefully we'll get started on this later this week!

After we went for lunch across the street, I came back and went to see the radiologist to learn about ultrasounds. He's been showing me how to read ultrasounds and to recognize the liver, kidneys, and bladder. Today he showed me another child with intussusception. He also taught me how crazy the radiologists are in Nepal. They work with every modality (eg CT, MRI, Doppler, echo, thyroid imaging, mammograms etc), both adults and children, and they even do interventional radiology. It's crazy the amount of information they have to retain. And their residency is only 3 years, but he told me that they work so hard during those three years and they barely see the lights of day (sleep 6 hours in 2 days). It's amazing how much these guys learn and work during that time. But life is easy afterwards.

Next I saw a little baby girl with a 6th toe (baby one without bone). It was a bit of a stub that they had tied off to cause necrosis. Then we went into the procedure room and he removed the toe. He just used a knife to cut it off but he also cut an artery so blood was spurting out and he had to suture it. An extra digit is called polydactyly.

After the hospital, I went back to the hotel and went out shopping with Erik and Katie from Ottawa. After we went for dinner and I tried my first ever water buffalo. It was a Tibetan dish called (buff) thenthuk.

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Photos

Dinner with the Group
L-R: Katie, Me, Erik

Panoramic View from the Hotel Roof
International Guest Hotel, Thamel, Kathmandu