Ashley Shira’s Blog

Day Thirteen

Day Twelve Part Two 

After our shift yesterday we decided to go over to the Labadie Hotel and have dinner.  While we were at the house waiting for David to arrive, Selassi called us to tell us there was a doctors’ meeting going on and they wanted us to join them. So we quickly put our scrubs back on and walked over to the hospital.  It was interesting to hear them discuss the frequent problems they see in the hospital and possible ways to go about education the population and possibly working on prevention.  Sitting in on the meeting also made Kim and I quite confused about the medical education process here in Ghana…we will have to investigate that more! After the meeting, David picked us up at the house and took us to Labadie Hotel.  We were disappointed to find the gift shop was completely over-priced, but we did buy a few postcards and small items.  Then we headed to the outside restaurant for dinner overlooking the pool.  I had an amazing Ghanaian spiced chicken kabob and fried rice….it is the one in the picture above…very impressive. It was very good and once again Kim and I were quite hungry after skipping lunch again. We even shared a brownie with ice cream and toffee sauce for dessert. YUM!! We tried to walk down to the beach after dinner, but stopped by security guards and told the beach was for residents only. So we called David to come pick us up and waited for him in the lobby.  On the way home we bought MTN credits for our cell phones while we were waiting in traffic.  The people walking amongst the traffic selling their goods makes it very easy to accomplish “errands” while you are sitting in traffic!

Day Thirteen

I didn’t sleep well last night for some reason….lots of tossing and turning! So it was very hard to wake up this morning.  I started my morning at the hospital with about an hour of research for my malaria presentation because Dr. Akosua was running late.  We found out when she arrived that her 2 year old son is sick. Clinic this morning was good.  We saw two newborn exams, a woman with a probable CVA that left her with a very frustrating expressive aphasia, and we even had Junior as a patient in clinic today.  He has malaria. After seeing all our clinic patients we walked over to the male ward to check on a patient that was admitted yesterday in sickle cell crisis and our patient from Monday with the head laceration. We looked at an x-ray of the trauma patients head and today it appears that he has a small epidural bleed so he will need to be transferred so that he can get a CT scan. We finished our day a little early so that Dr. Akosua could check on her little boy.  She is off tomorrow so we are going to take the day off as well then work with her on Saturday.  Right now we are planning to visit the National Museum in downtown Accra tomorrow! Love and miss everyone!! P.S. I added some pictures to the first blog or two b/c the computer is working very well today!