Today I almost had a heart attack a few times. The first was on morning rounds in the hospital when they said that a baby had a bilirubin of 430! (for those of you who are nonmedical we generally start to get concerned around 15) Then I realized that they use mmol/L instead of mg/dl. So this is still actually high enough to require exchange transfusion (which they unfortunately did in the evening after we left so I didn't get to participate) but not nearly as high as I thought. Then this afternoon in clinic they brought in a 10 day old baby from a very rural region who was seizing and it didn't stop with medicines. The baby had been born at home with no pre or postnatal care and both the baby and Mom ... read more

So we made it safely to Namibia. The 15 hour flight to South Africa ended up not being as bad as we expected since we were able to sleep for 6-7 hours and had a large selection of movies to choose from. Dr. Brown picked us up from the airport and he and his wife, Pam, have made as feel very welcome in their home. We actually slept pretty well last night, I think our irregular sleep schedule from being on call has actually benefitted us for once. This morning we went to Katatura Hospital for a half day of work. I am working with the babies 2 years and under and Katie is working with the older kids. There medical education and training is different here. After medical school they do an internship that is ... read more

Today we made our final visit to the Immaculate Heart of Mary orphanage. Our first concern was the girl who we had sent to the hospital last week for stomach pain. To our relief, it turned out that she was just fine. We saw quite a few staff members and children with parasites this week, probably because some kids had gone home for the Holy Week. We also saw quite a few colds or "colds", because as one of the house mothers said, whenever we come everyone is "sick", so that they can hang out with us. We also examined one of the nuns who may have rheumatoid arthritis, so she must go to the hospital for some tests. We got to practice our OMM skills a little today on a few women who had back ... read more

This morning after we crawled out of bed, stretched, and took some advil, we had pancakes and papaya smoothies and then rested up for our 10 minute walk to the Hilton. Although the walk up and down the hills to the hotel was pretty much torture, we spent the rest of the afternoon being fancy and drinking mojitos by the pool. Once we decided that we had inflicted enough sun damage upon ourselves we walked over to a seafood/sushi restaurant a few blocks away. Our waiter was incredibly nice and started out by bringing us complimentary drinks. Unfortunately they were DISGUSTING. They were orange and fizzy but they tasty spicy and tomatoey so we are thinking that it was some type of especially gross blood mary. We entertained ourselves throughout the rest of our meal by ... read more

Happy Birthday Dad!! Much love from both of us, hope you had a great day! Today we donned our special masks and went to brave the tuberculosis wards. Dr. Iglesias explained to us that there is thought to be a 100% exposure rate to tuberculosis in El Salvador, but not everyone develops the disease. The Saldana Hospital where we work was originally devoted entirely to TB, so it is considered the place to go in the country if you have a difficult case of TB. Most of the men that we saw were alcoholics who were malnourished, which makes one more susceptible to developing outright TB. A few of the men were hospitalized because they weren't taking their medication at home so they had to be monitored to be sure they were taking their meds to ... read more