Tricia’s Blog

Liking Uganda, still disliking doctoring…

We are now finishing our first week in
Uganda. It has not been too difficult in terms of cultural adjustment. Well, easy for me to say, as Mandy was the one squirting out of both ends all day on Monday. But really, we have been well. We have had the usual frustrations of huge amounts of traffic, so driving to and from work tacks a couple of hours onto a rather long work day, lack of internet access, as well as lack of transportation of our own, so we have to really plan ahead to go anywhere, and many times we’ve said “Oh, we’d like to go to that market” but then we realize that it will take us so long to get there and back that we don’t have time to do it. But otherwise, it has been a fairly easy transition. However, I feel that is largely because we are surrounded by Europeans, not by Ugandans. We have not gotten to experience the Ugandan culture hardly at all. We live in a house with Belgians, Swiss, and British people. We work with people from
Britain, and some Ugandans, but obviously more well-off ones. We haven’t even eaten any local food yet, but I just learned today that the cafeteria outside our clinic serves typical Ugandan food, so hopefully we’ll try that next week. We spend our days at the clinic, Mandy and I alternate between the ER and seeing outpatients. We continue to see lots of malaria and abdominal complaints. No more boda accidents since a couple of days ago, but I can’t imagine that is the last one we’ll see, with all of the traffic here.

Dr. Stockley is our supervisor, and is a very unique person. I think he is a very good doctor, especially within the resources he has available, but he is also a man with no filter. He says anything that pops into his head. He has asked multiple men when their due date is, letting them know that they are overweight. He told the interpreter to shut up one morning because the interpreter was supposed to be interpreting between English and French, but unfortunately he didn’t seem to know much English. Dr. Stockley also told a girl that she was being given an antibiotic, and she didn’t need to worry about side effects; she could drink beer and get pregnant but he advised her not to do both at the same time, because she’d probably spill the beer. It has been pretty fun working with him, as he teaches us well, and definitely gives us something to laugh at most of the time. There is a lot of HIV here, and we are seeing some patients like that. We have also been seeing children from a local orphanage, and some of them are very sick. One little boy has tracheomalacia (we think) and sounds absolutely terrible, with loud stridor and incredibly deep retractions at all times. He also has TB and pneumonia. Two other little boys were brought in who had been abused, they were completely starving, as in totally underweight, and one had been burned a lot. They were very anemic, probably from malnutrition, with hemoglobins of 3. Very sad case. Mandy and I are hoping to visit that orphanage at some point during our time here.

I am personally becoming corrupted. The girls in the house watch Grey’s Anatomy every night. I always thought I wouldn’t watch that “trash” but I find myself becoming drawn into it the last couple of evenings while eating. Eating is another thing. I love to do it, but I’m not getting enough exercise to keep up my present amount of eating. I did go for a very short run earlier this week, but found it extremely hard for several reasons. First, because it is at a little more elevation than we have at home, second because it is hot, third because it is very hilly everywhere, and the biggest reason of all is because I am completely out of shape at baseline, so even if the first 3 weren’t true, I’d still struggle. Doesn’t look like I’ll have time to run on too many days, but we’ll see.

Today Mandy and I decided to try to find a market that only happens on Friday and is within 1 km of our house. So we left home in the morning (we work afternoon and evening today) and started walking. We knew one way that would get us there for sure, but for some reason we went the opposite way (Okay, it was because I’d run the opposite way the day before and felt quite sure I knew a shortcut). We thought we’d be able to find it, but we were wrong. We walked up and down very muddy, steep hills for about an hour before we decided to just go back the way we knew for sure. Once we did that we made it in only 15 minutes, so that would have been the way to go. Oh well, we needed the exercise. Once we got there, they didn’t have what we were looking for anyway, so we turned around and walked the kilometer back up to the house. Not a very productive morning! This weekend we are going on a safari, Mandy, my sister Betsy, and I. We are looking forward to it, everyone tells us it will be a lot of fun. However, I diagnosed malaria in a guy yesterday who had just been where we’re going, so we’ll have to be careful. Mandy and I have discussed timing our malaria so we get it right when we return to the States, allowing us to miss the first week of our next rotations. That is our goal.

What I have learned here is that I like talking to people, trying to learn about different customs and cultures, and seeing what they are concerned about, but I still don’t like being a doctor. That hasn’t changed since leaving the
US. I was hoping I’d come here and find that I love practicing medicine away from residency, but as I’d feared, it hasn’t happened. I like everything I’m doing here except the working as a doctor part. I think it is official that I made the wrong career choice. Not much I can do about that now.

I have also seen interesting effects of lifestyle. Out of all of the patients we’ve seen in the past week, maybe 2 were here for checks of their blood pressure, one or two for diabetes, I’ve seen one person since I’ve been here who has a history of heart disease. There is just no obesity among the Africans we are seeing, so they don’t have those types of illnesses. It would be nice to walk to work everyday, generally be active, and not have to worry about some of the illnesses that plague most of the American population. That is all I have to report for now, I’ll have to write about the safari sometime next week!