Tricia’s Blog

Still alive, and haven’t killed anyone else either…yet…

Whew, what a crazy few days. I know Mandy will share some of the same stories in her blog, but they’re worth sharing, so I will too…

We are working fairly hard. I was hoping for a bit of a break from residency, but our hours have been similar or worse than back home…I had my first day of seeing patients on my own, but I told Dr. Stockley about all of them before treating them or doing anything to them, so I had a lot of supervision. Yesterday alone we saw 3 cases of malaria, several HIV+ patients, several patients being treated for TB, and lots and lots of people with diarrhea who had amebas or other parasites in their stool. I think the most common complaint here is belly pain and diarrhea, followed closely by “I think I have malaria.” Our clinic sees mostly international patients, as they have to pay to be seen, so we see lots and lots of Europeans, some Ugandans, and occasionally Sudanese or Somalians. Also Australians. Last night we worked until 8 pm, left the clinic about 8:30, and it took us 1 hour to make the 5.5 mile drive home. Crazy. I tell you, the traffic and driving here is amazing. And we were with a driver (Dr. Stockley) who has been driving here for 30 years and knows what he’s doing…we took several very rutted, horrible dirt roads through the bush to get around the deadlocked traffic on the roads.

Speaking of the driving and traffic, I am now convinced not to ride a boda-boda. It is a motorbike used like a taxi here…tons of people use them to get around. Today on the way in to the clinic we witnessed a rather severe boda accident right in front of us. A man was driving his boda boda and another man stepped off the curb immediately in front of him. The boda driver swerved hard to miss him, but couldn’t because he was too close, so he hit the pedestrian (who fell, but then was able to get up and walk away) and crashed his bike so he ended up in a twisted heap beneath it. He hit his head pretty hard, and his leg was twisted around. So since we were driving with Dr. Stockley, we stopped, picked up the unconscious boda driver and put him in the back of the car and took him to the clinic with us. (This clinic is 24-hrs, has rooms like a general doctors’ office, but also 2 ER beds and 2 inpatient beds). We got him to the ER where he woke up rather confused. His leg ended up being okay, despite looking like it was really hurt. He had bleeding road burn all over, but actually came around and seemed okay. I thought he was dead when I watched as his head on the ground right in front of me. So we cleaned up his abrasions and sent him home. Crazy, since at home we would have done a full-body CT scan and kept him around awhile. He got no labs and no studies and no meds. Here they have Tylenol, ibuprofen, and Ultram, I haven’t ever seen any narcotics. No one has come in requesting pain medication at all, whereas that is a routine request every day in South Bend.

We live in a house with 4 other international people, two from Belgium, one from England, and one from Switzerland, as well as the owner of the home and her 14-yr-old daughter. I can’t remember if I already told you that. Anyway, my room, and Mandy’s is in an outside building, very very small, but fine for our purposes. We have a toilet and a shower that we share between the 4 of us, you have to go outside to get to them, but we actually have warm water if the electricity is on. We go to the main house to cook and eat. So far we’ve been making rice and beans or rice and vegebables. We need to go grocery shopping again because we’re running out of food, but our hours have been long and transportation is a problem, so we haven’t. We are off this weekend for our safari, but it looks like we work every other day while we’re here, even Sunday. It’s been fun meeting so many people from so many different places, and overall we’re having a good time, despite the very long drives to and from work (I could often run 5.5 miles faster than we drive it!) and the lack of ability to get places to use the internet or buy food. The people seem very friendly, and even when I walked through town alone I didn’t feel like I had men yelling at me like I always did in Central America. They do greet me with mzungu though.

 28 seconds until my time at the internet cafe runs out…more later!!!