Home Sweet Home

So, I've been here a month now - eeek it's totally flown by! But I really feel at home here now :-)

Didn't go anywhere exciting this weekend as I needed to renew my visa which happened successfully and with no trouble at all though I had to pay £20 for the privilege. I tried to pick up some post that has arrived for me - very exciting :-) but couldn't as it was shut at the weekends. Will hopefully get there tomorrow.

It's a good job I didn't go anywhere really because apparently I was on call on Sunday and only found out when a guard came to fetch me (they couldn't get hold of me on my mobile as it was switched off from being in church in the morning!) African organisation!! Oh well, it was OK and there wasn't an emergency - just all the kids needed clerking for the coming weeks surgeries. By the time I'd got to the kids ward the consultant doing surgery on the Monday was already there doing his ward round, he didn't seem to mind too much that I hadn't clerked any of his patients!! If I was in the UK I would have been sacked - never mind nobody had told me I was supposed to be on call! Anyway all is well and I have now tracked down the on call schedule for this month and am on call this coming Wednesday night and on the 20th. Please pray whatever (if anything) I get called about I will be able to deal with confidently and well. I continue to be amazed by the patients here - they cope with so much. Any child with a deformity, even as small as a clubfoot, will have less in life than 'normal' children. Their families may reject them, they have less education, less job prospects, and even less prospect of marrying! It breaks my heart. Yet we are constantly rewarded by the huge smiles on their faces when they see that their limb is fixed/no longer in pain, or even when we tell them we can do something to help. I manipulated (pulled into it's correct position) a fractured forearm today in a 10yr old boy who had ONLY been given paracetamol and ibuprofen 30 minutes beforehand! He didn't even shed a tear, yet in the UK we would spend hundreds of pounds doing it in theatre when the child is anaesthetised. By the way this was a western kid who has lived here for 6 years as his parents are missionaries.

Sheila has now left :-( but I am getting on extremely well with Hollie the new med student. Dr Cashman is really nice and is very approachable and is good at teaching. I hope to get a project started soon with him on neglected lateral condyle fractures and how we should be treating them.

Bianca (the German student) leaves this Friday :-( I have also gotten on really well with her and will be sad to see her go. We are having a party around ours on Wednesday.

I have even found a hockey team at the medical school who I can train with and am going tomorrow - they have a goalie kit I can use (who knows what state it is in though!) I am really looking forward to it.

That's about it really for this week, ooooh the upload of a photo of me and Sheila up the mountain worked :-) YAY - see it above.

Much love

H xxxxxxxxx