I would like to start this picture collage with a few bulls that were fighting just over the hill. I think that it is a nice symbol of our daily struggle against sin, with Christ being the mountain in the background overshadowing all of us. (A bit of a reach?)
This is the dirt pile just outside my house, which the kids of the compound have turned into a castle. Dr. Hardin is supervising their work and occasionally will call them to stand at attention if they play a little too rough.
This is the Anderson's house and as you can see in the coming pictures, their gardens are amazing.
This is the house that I am staying in. Pretty darn nice, even by Western standards.
This is the living room.
This is the washing machine. It returns clothes folded.
This is another washing machine. It does not fold clothes.
The kitchen
My bedroom.
A nice little gazebo, perfect for church, birthday parties, or bible studies.
Our porch, from whence I currently type.
Now to the hospital. This is the surgeon's room, and as per usual Teddy, one of the residents from the Black Hospital in Addis, is hard at work. The table to the left magically has injera appear on it every day at noon and the bookshelf in the back has more medical knowledge in it than I could ever hope to fit into my head.
This is the Pan-Africa Academy of Christian Surgeon's (PAACS) resident's house. It will eventually expand from 7 apartments to 21.
A nice little pavilion just outside of the hospital, if you squint you can see the common occurence of a family member of a patient sleeping on it.
This is the new CT building. We spent most of this morning unloading a shipping container into this building. The pictures at the end document this cheerful event.
The driveway into the hospital
This is just overlooking the hospital compound. The mountain in the background is about 9500 ft high and will be conquered before the end of this trip.
This is a shot of the wards, they generally keep it pretty clean.
This is our arch nemesis, the food cart. We try to beat it on rounds so that we can see our patients while they are still fasting and have the possibility of taking them to the OR.
Dr. Warren Terry, my former roommate, with one his favorite patients Maria.
One of our patients. I hope that my PT friends will note the continual passive motion machine, rehab is key.
This poor kid had a bad open fracture of his femur and has a 8 inch wound that goes down to bone on his thigh. If you recall my previous post about pain, he is a prime example, but he is a really nice guy whenever his bandage isn't being changed. Each room typically has 3-6 patients in it, although there a few private rooms.
Another patient, still kinda in a daze this morning.
Same deal.
This is known as OR 3. Notice the C-arm that can be used for intraoperative X-rays.
This is OR 4 and these two beds are often going simultaneously. Generally we put our smaller cases in this room.
This is a classic example of the kind of problems that you see in Ethiopia. This is a 18ish year old guy who broke his leg several years ago. It obviously wasn't casted very well and his leg is about 3 inches shorter than his other leg. We took him to surgery, rebroke his leg, made it the right length and fixed it with a metal rod down the middle of the bone (aka IM nail).
This is the ICU/PACU/Pre-Op and where we start rounds every morning.
The sutures, trying to find the correct type of stitch on the correct needle in the correct size is a constant battle.
This is one of our patients and her mother. This sweet little girl is 2 years old and has had shin pain and swelling for the past 3 weeks. After being seen by another hospital, she was brought her and found to have acute osteomyelitis (bone infection). If you can catch it in the early stage, you can do a minimally invasive surgery where you drill a hole at the top and bottom of the shin bone and flush out the infection. She just came here on Saturday and she will likely need to go back to the OR several times before she leaves.
Another picture of her. She was not happy to see me.
The long awaited container with the equipment for the CT scanner has finally arrived!!! This crod of Ethiopians pretty much self-assembled to unload the truck. By the end, I think there were 30-40.
Those darn lazy Americans, just watching things...
Since we couldn't get the truck into the compound, we had to load everything into Dr. Grey's truck or Dr Ayre's SUV and ferry it about 500 yrds to the CT building.
Since we couldn't shut the door to the SUV, my job was to ride on the back and make sure that it didn't open and spill our precious cargo. This was one of our many violations of OSHA during the day.
We started the process at about 9 and finished around 3. It was basically a controlled disaster, but we were rewarded the entertainment of watching the shipping container being pulled off the truck. The tied it to another container and just pulled forward. Although this sounds simple, it still took about an hour. This whole experience made me appreciate the infastructure of the US and how easy it is ship and move stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment