Last Day at the Hospital

The hospital today was more exciting than yesterday. Right away in the morning, I went up to Millennium Theater, which is where they perform all of the C-sections. They do a lot of C-sections each day because they prefer to do that over natural birth, since it reduces the risk of the baby contracting HIV if the mother has it. They also have less complications with C-sections. Anyways, preparing the mother for the C-section took about an hour, during which Angie and I were just sort of hanging out with the nurses. Once they started the actual procedure, it took about 5 minutes to put her under anesthesia and 10 minutes from the first cut to the baby’s cord being cut. It was so fast!! This was actually much more gruesome to watch than the natural birth, so I’ve decided to have my babies naturally. Yes, I realize this isn’t really up to me. It then took about a half hour to finish stitching the mother back up. The baby was a healthy baby girl and mommy and baby are both going good.

After the C-section, I went up to Major Theater to watch part of a cardio-thoracic surgery. The gentleman needed part of his esophagus removed because of cancer. The surgeons were trying to get to the esophagus from the belly, but were unsuccessful so they ended up just stitching everything back together and then trying to go in from the side. The spread and cracked ribs 5 and 6 and went in from there. We had to leave before the surgery was completely, but it was pretty cool to see. I’m very surprised how okay I am with surgery because I always thought I would be squeamish when it came to that stuff.

 

One thing that I don’t think I have mentioned yet is how weird they are about cell phones here. There is absolutely no inappropriate time to answer your cell phone. The surgeons answer in the middle of surgery, the doctors in the middle of an evaluation, the drivers in the middle of traffic, you name it. It must be really rude to let a call go to voicemail here.

Before we left for the day, we went down to Casualty to see what was all going on. It turns out that there was a lady in there who was a victim of the Tana River massacre. There are two tribes in that region that are fighting over land and water rights. One tribe attacked the other last week and burned down some houses. I think 5-10 people were killed. Then that tribe attacked this lady’s tribe yesterday morning. There were 100 armed warriors attacking this village. They killed 48 people, only 6 men and the rest were women and children. It is a remarkably sad story that these two tribes are so willing to kill each other. This lady in Casualty had lost her whole family in that attack. It was really a miracle that she was still alive. She had a deep gash in her head and a deep gash in her check, exposing her maxilla. It was crazy. Her jaw was so broke that her mouth wasn’t even under her nose any more. She also had a long, deep cut in her arm, wrist and palm. That cut had severed all of the tendons in her hand and exposed her ulna (her arm bone for those of you who don’t know you anatomy). It was by far the worst injuries I had seen yet at the hospital. They thought they were going to have to do extensive surgery, but I’m pretty sure they just reset her jaw and stitched her all up. It really is a miracle that she survived the attack with just that.

This was probably our last day at the hospital. We are going to try and get our sleeping patterns closer to what they will be at home by going to the hospital and working a night shift Friday night.

After the hospital, we ate lunch and then went to Old Town to complete our souvenir shopping. I probably spent more than I should have, but it all goes so quickly when it’s just a couple dollars at a time. That should be my last major expense though (how crazy is that?) so I’m telling myself that it’s okay. After all, I don’t know if I will ever make it back to Africa, and if I do, it may not be to this region.

Tonight we are all hanging out as a going-away party. We are hoping to make it until sunrise and then watch the sunrise on the beach, but we’ll have to see how that goes. I can’t believe this is one of my last nights here! This time really has gone by incredibly fast. I’m so thankful for this experience. It has taught me so much, but I won’t get into that right now. I’ll save it for my last blog.