So Jason is here until Friday, and he'll take an Air France flight back to Hotel Bravo with the Hong Kong Team (the HKT's). His wife is trying to get him a flight back on Ethiopian airways on Sunday, so we'll see how that works out. Maybe they'll even change it for free.....? We can hope. I've been scheming on how to have Jason fall out of a tree or something, maybe trying to grab a nearly ripe mango....then we could evac him out with our emergency evacuation insurance. We also offered to do a nerve block and manually break his leg for him. He was not so agreeable, so we'll just wait till Friday. Again, ok with me. We also just bought our 12 pack of coke so we can enjoy that together now.
Rounds started a bit late today as they had a committee meeting that Dr. Wegner is a part of. I took a look at the lady we did "plastic surgery" on last night, and was able to grab some post pictures of her face, which looked pretty good today. Her family was telling us that copious amounts of blood was coming out of her nose, which was an exaggeration of a lot. She had some cotton or tampons shoved up both nostrils that were soaked and clotted with blood, so I made some make-shift tweezers out of a tongue blade to get those out. Amanda and I were hoping to use the rhino-rocket if her nose was still bleeding profusely, but alas it was not. At least her nose looks good now.
Most of the people on rounds were doing well. Our pre-mature baby is still kickin' (and I got a picture for y'all too) and at about 800g now I think (birth weight was 1000g). Sadly our little guy that Kara did the lumbar puncture on died overnight.....we aren't quite sure why, likely aspirated and died. I guess he stopped breathing and they tried bagging, but they don't do proper bagging yet either so we need to teach them that as well. But otherwise, people were doing well. Our bowel resection and anastomoses patients are all doing well, passing gas and having bowel movements. Our hysterectomy patients are peeing, so their ureters didn't get destroyed. And some of our cerebral malaria kids are out of their comas and bouncing around. And the Salles de Urgences is mostly empty....though as I said to Amanda today, empty beds just means more room for sick patients, so we might get rocked soon.
We broke off from rounds to go do a hysterectomy, which Jason scrubbed in for and assisted. That went well, though Dr. Wegner still gets a bit paranoid about tying off the ureters (rightly so, easy to do in this surgery) and so we've been keeping an eye on her post-op and ultrasounded her kidneys....so far so good. We also had a post-stroke lady come in who had pulled out her gastric tube, which they had to open her up to put it in as they don't exactly have scopes here. We tried to shove it back in with ultrasound and a hemostat, but nope didn't work. There's a surgeon in the DRC who is trying to figure out how to put a G-tube in with just ultrasound and a nasogastric tube. I suggested using some sort of magnet system.....maybe Jason and I can try to invent something. We'll have to open this lady back up to replace it, so for now we just put a nasogastric tube in for now. We also then called our guy in and pulled his chest tube out (the one we placed the other day). Basically have him take a deep breath and then "pretend you're pulling a lawn mower cord."
We headed back to the ER to check on our sick dude, who had been treated for malaria in the past but didn't follow up with us. We retested him for malarai, which was negative, and he had a stiff neck so we did a lumbar puncture. He was a tough one to do the LP on, and I didn't get it, so Dr. Wegner tried, and he couldn't get it with the guy lying down either. So we repositioned him and tried again and finally got it. Ended up being positive for meningitis, so we are treating him now. Hopefully he gets better.
We chilled for a bit in Dr. Kiong's office, who is officially titled as the head of obstetrics. He didn't want that on the door, but Stephanie snuck it onto his name badge anyway. Then Dr. Wegner shared with us that one of his cousins is an epic white rapper, who has some stuff on YouTube. So we looked him up. Actually got a few seconds of his song to download. You'll have to check him out since we know the family :) Chuckie Campbell is his name. Our favorite line is about "white rappers and black presidents." And I don't know what the context is because we can't get much to download here, but it was like the one line that Dr. Wegner remembered from the past, so it's our rap line now.
We rode our bikes over to the Harvey's to spend some time playing games with Noah and convinced the girls to come over and play Risk with us. They were less than thrilled and didn't exactly enjoy the game, but it brings back some great memories from high school when we used to play all the time. It's nice having Jason here to play games with us anyway.....
Well, I'm getting eaten by mosquitos out here, so I'm gonna post and call it a night. I'll try to write some more tomorrow. Thanks for reading. God bless.
Dinga nini = "sup," more or less in Lingala. And it's fun to say. Not sure if I'm spelling it right, but hey.
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