Silvestri’s Blog

TB Village

Hello there!

A quick update on some recent thoughts and experiences.  Today Darryl and I went to the TB Village together.  Darryl had been before with his friend who runs the village and lives there.  I think I already explained what the village was before but anyways today we went to hand out clothes and flipflops and toys for the families living there.  The female surgeon who is here and her friend rounded all this stuff up and brought 4 duffle bags stuffed with gifts.  It was so awesome to be a part of it and I mostly went to just see how something like this works.  Because there are only a limited number of families living there it was a little more sane than handing out stuff in the middle of Nalerigu.  The kids were adorable and so excited about bubbles and toy cars.  So awesome to see faces so excited.  Fun to experience it with Darryl.   He has a little boy there that he loves and he is so cute playing with him.

On a totally different note the other day I peeled someone alive.  Yeah, I felt less human afterwards.  This girl had burns over so much of her body; both of her legs, her buttocks and one of her hands.  She needed to be debrided so she could heal and the burns were only 2nd degree most places (I say only because usually the kids we get with burns are worse).  So I helped peel off the superficial skin and she had a spinal so we worked quickly to get it done (limited time till the anesthetic wore off).  At some points I would just ask Vince “this is going to help her right?” and of course he explained patiently to me yes and why and all that.  There is just something weird about peeling off someone’s skin.  I won’t go into more detail about the peeling (although I so want to) but I think one of the good parts about it all was working with the scrub techs and surgery staff.  It took a lot of us to roll her around to bandage her and at one point there were 6 of us working together.  It was just cool to work with these amazing people who have such a different background than myself and have the same goal.. to help this patient heal.  I love working as a team.  The staff here work so hard and know so much its great to learn from them.

Thats all for now.  The Malaria meds are giving me crazy dreams but its just amusing so far.  Here some of the men have multiple wives but in my dream I had multiple husbands ha.  Darryl laughed… of course I would reverse it eh?

Hope all is well with you guys!  We have another funeral tomorrow after clinic… Darryl is getting a smock from someone so I hope he dances (the guys have to be wearing one to dance).  I will get a video if he does : )