Nathan & Megan’s Blog

First Call

Hi,          (this is nathan)

 So, I had my first call at the hospital yesterday (megan has hers today).  At the hospital call consists of see emergencies (or what the workers think are emergencies) and seeing the people that the medical assistants admit.   MA’s are ghanans who triage/treat and are the first line of attack.

The day started with making rounds on hospitalized patients.  I had a first on pediatric rounds yesterday.  As I was sitting on the bed trying to examine a little boy, he started peeing (not too unusual), however this time he actually found his own mouth.  I was a little shocked my this, yet the mom just wiped his face off and went on with the exam.  During the morning I helped Matt, the general surgery resident, with a skin graft and then got to remove an infected finger.  Kind of cool I guess.  I wouldn’t have guessed it before I got here, but skin grafting is a very valuable thing to be able to do.  Lots of people with infections/accidents who need grafting.  After that I got to see a pregnant patient who was bleeding at 16 weeks.  Luckily she still had a viable pregnancy.  We do have an ultrasound machine here to look which helps.  After breaking for lunch, we came back (a 4th year medical student and I took call together) to make afternoon rounds.  This basically consists of seeing new patients and changing orders that MA’s make.  We had two incarcerated hernias come in during the evening which we had to go see.  We spent about 2 hours on one guy trying to reduce (put the intestines back in the abdomen).  After 4 people trying we were unsuccessful.  However the other guy’s just popped in for me after about 10 seconds which was pretty cool.  About this point (9pm) the one guy was being taken back for surgery on his hernia when a guy got in a motorbike wreck and sliced open his heel pretty badly.  The 4th year student and I fixed that while Matt fixed the hernia.  We tried to talk the guy out of riding motorbikes but apparently he left the hospital today on a motorbike. 

After this we didn’t get any more “calls”.  A call consists of someone going to your house and knocking on your door.  This is probably a little more annoying than a pager I think.  Today I have had the day off while Megan is taking her first call.  Hopefully she won’t have any “calls” tonight either because I need a good nights sleep

Nathan