Bike ride, X-ray, and surgery

Good evening from Uganda! At least it’s evening here. There is about an 11 hour time difference so when I am up and busy everyone back home is sound asleep. Just an interesting thought. This last week I was joined at the guest house by two more volunteers from Quincy CA. They are both nurses and will be here for 3 weeks. It’s kind of nice to have more American English speakers around because it takes a far amount of concentration to follow the Ugandan/British accents of the people here, although, I’m getting much better at it. This last weekend, in addition to the soccer game, I had the opportunity to go on a 5 mile bike ride through the smaller villages in the area. The other two volunteers and I made an afternoon of it and had a great time. At the first village we came to most everyone was inside at the church service while the kids where out playing in the school yard/soccer field. When we rode up we immediately became the center of attention and a throng of children came running to greet us. We had a fun time taking pictures with them and where probably making it difficult for the adults in the church to have service. As we rode away from the first village the throng followed us and some of the children kept up with us through the next 3 villages. Four of the boys from the first village made the whole loop back to the hospital. The villages we passed where very small but surrounded by very pretty hills covered in farms and jungle. It was great to get away from the hospital for a bit and see some of the countryside. I feel like I live in a bit of a bubble at the hospital so it was great to see how people live in the surrounding area. I’m still trying to summarize the state of things in Uganda verses the US but I’ll save that for another post.

            Today was an interesting day. It’s Thursday here which means the local market is bring in a crowd of people to the hospital. There was also an orthopedic clinic today. I was busy helping one of the Docs take x-rays this morning. The x-ray room came prebuilt in a shipping container from the Nevada City Rotary club in northern California. It is an old-fashioned film x-ray that is somewhat of an art. It was fun learning how to position patients for different studies and then developing the film in a dark room which was also inside the shipping container. For imaging the hospital only has x-ray and ultrasound both of which can only be used during the 6 hours that the generator is running.

 The container on the right is the x-ray room and the gray container on the left is the pharmacy.

            This afternoon I was briefly in the theater. This is not a movie theater but the OR. Everyone here refers to the operating room as the theater which is a separate building where patients come for major to minor surgeries and also c-sections. There is no surgeon per se who works at the hospital. Instead the docs, who are trained mostly as general practitioners, are the surgeons, internists, OB/GYN and orthopedist. This afternoon I assisted with a simple closure of a wound in the theatre with one of the docs. It is pretty different from an OR in the US where most everything used is disposable. Everything here apart from the gauze is washed, sterilized, and reused.

 The silver tins on the far wall are all the sterilized equipment and materials. No ventilator, just an oxygen concentrator and then they use mostly spinal blocks or local anesthesia for surgery.

"Kid on bike", an artsy photo