Nathan & Megan’s Blog

First Day of Rounds

From Megan:

One thing Nathan forgot to mention was that we also talked with a Nigerian man while we were stuck for 5 hours in Casablanca’s airport.  At one point, he spoke up and told me that I looked African.  I was a little confused as I’m very white and have blonde hair and grey eyes.  After some explaining, we realized he meant that I had wide hips and a bit of a booty.  :)  I decided to take it as a compliment but have never before been told I looked African.

We got to help with morning rounds in the hospital this morning.  I spent my morning in the under 5 years old Peds ward with the pediatrician, Dr. Miller, who is currently volunteering.  There were so many children that several patients were sleeping on the floor.  The beds have no rails and consist of a thin mattress that they cover with a blue plastic sheet.  Any other cloth bedding is brought in by the parents.   The majority of the children hospitalized currently had malaria, so I’ve gotten pretty good with writing for quinine (10 mg/kg q 8 hours just so you know).  Many of the kids with malaria required blood transfusions, which come from the parents.  There’s no blood bank here.  We also had a case of suspected typhoid fever and several malnourished children, one with severe dermatitis.  We lost 3 children overnight, but I have to remind myself that we hopefully saved a lot more.

Later in the morning Nathan did a lumbar puncture on a sick teenage boy, and we helped Matt, a surgical resident who is doing his residency in Knoxville (we came across the world to meet somebody from home), do some wound debridements.  The surgical facilities are present here but definitely more primitive than home.  They mostly use ketamine for sedation, which means the people don’t remember anything but can still talk and move around.  People are very bizarre under ketamine, so it took a little bit of getting used to to hear them mumbling in Mrampuli (the local dialect) and making strange noises.  You’re never quite sure if they’re hurting or just deranged from the ketamine.

As for our living quarters, they’re much nicer than expected.  For right now, Nathan and I have a whole little house to ourselves.  We have a king size bed and an attached bathroom complete with functional toilet and a shower with hot water.  We have a small kitchen with filtered water right there, so we don’t have to walk across campus to get water.  There’s a guest house where we take all our meals.  They have a mysogenistic (is that how you spell it?) monkey tied up out back who hates women.  She got her rope wrapped around a tree and couldn’t reach her water today, so I distracted her while Nathan moved her water dish closer.  Every time I got remotely close to her, she ran and took a flying leap at me with her mouth wide open.  Yep, she definitely didn’t like me very much. 

There are also 2 African boys who like to hang out on the front porch.  I think they’re just inquisitive, but it’s a bit unnerving to have two children staring at you through the front window while you’re trying to read your Bible.  I guess when you’re tall and white you make for an interesting spectacle to the locals.

Well, that’s all for now.  There’s talk of venturing out to visit one of the local places to sightsee this afternoon.  More later!

Megan