Thursday 12th August
Thank you all for your kind prayers, I have felt much better since the other evening. Every morning I feel God is talking directly to me through the morning worship sessions. Yesterday we looked at Colossians where it says ‘work as you are working for the Lord and not for men.’ And todays was Jeremiah 29:11 ‘I have plans for you, plans to prosper and not to harm you.’ These are probably two my most favourite verses in the Bible and God has used them just at the right time – AMAZING!
I am still getting used to the Malawi way of things, I seem to be finished each day between 2-3pm! Which seems really strange and I have to keep asking – ‘is there anything else that needs doing?!’ They say, no, go home, relax! So I do! Apparently it can be much busier and in addition I will hopefully get stuck into some research in the next few weeks, so I will be grateful for the free time to look at that. Also I’m not on the on call rota until September as they had already written it for August before I arrived.
The past 2 days it has been much like an English September/October with strong gusting winds and rain, today the theatre staff mede me laugh by putting on anywhere between 2 and 5 (yes 5!) layers of scrubs because they were so cold. They offered me more because I only had one layer on I told them it wasn’t as cold as England and that they should come back with me in January to see what cold really is, they declined! I really like the theatre staff, they are all really jokey and friendly and like singing in theatre, very different to the UK; once the laughter subsided we got to work.
I got a bit of a shock in the first case. It is always a joke that Orthopods use black and decker drills, well today it was truth! They did actually use a black and decker drill for inserting some K wires (metal wires that are slightly flexible and about 0.5-5mm in diameter depending on which bone you are fixing) into a toe. The black and decker drill, as it is not sterile, was carefully placed into a sterile coat made from cloth which looked specially made for its occasion! In the UK we use special drills that do look similar but are stainless steel and much lighter and you can put them into the sterilisers, so there is no need for a special coat.
The next case we did was a young chap who had a car accident, which is sadly all too common here. He had an unusaul fracture of his femur (thigh bone) it was broken in 2 places – at the neck in the hip and half way down, which presented an intersting problem of how to fix it. Usually to fix the higher fracture a nail is used that reaches to about mid thigh (just where the other fracture in this chap was!) So we had to use a much longer nail with locking screws near the knee and ones further up which were angled onto the hip to stop the fractures rotating on the nail, pretty cool stuff especially since it is in Africa – we did have an intraoperative xray machine though which always helps. This type of surgery is ALWAYS done with xray guidance in the UK, in Afrcia it seems to be optional!
It was really cool to be able to pray over the patient in theatre before we anaesthetised them, no where else I thought.
Me and Sheila (the physio student) have made a plan to go to Zomba on Saturday which is a small town about an hours drive fom Blantyre, there is the Zomba plateau to walk up and hike around, so hopefully the weather perks up and I’ll get some photos of the surrounding landscape. 2 nights ago I went with Sheila to Aisha’s house. Aisha is the lead physio here, she is an American with 2 kids who lives as she call it the Beverly hills of Blantyre (i.e. the poshest row of houses EVER in Africa). Her house was posh even to British standards. We went round there to make chocolate cake and other yummy things like bana cake, and ‘caramel corn’ which in Englush is toffee popcorn! I got confused with measuring stuff out in ‘cups’ I mean how exactly are you supposed to measure margarine out in a cup? Aisha agreed it was difficult and told me 1 cup is equal to approx 250g which again confused me as I cook in ounces because that’s what my Mam taught me! We also made Reeces peanut butter cups – which I think are a gross misconduct to chocolate – why smother peanut butter in chocolate? The HORROR (I don’t like peanuts, did you guess?!)
Please pray I continue to settle in and do not become homesick again, and also pray for safe travel on Saturday (and good weather)
H xxxxxxxx
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