A Typical Week?

This past week we had very little in the way of adventure and since the weekend capped off with Peter being on call there was even less excitement these past two days.

Truth be told, after last week and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (sorry Mr. Disney) I’m still in recovery mode for a bit and was very, very glad to hang out on the ship and get some sleep as well as do some laundry and other mundane tasks. 

As a reminder of our last weekend we had a road trip to the bush punctuated by my untimely run in with a hot muffler on a motorcycle.  Although I returned back to our camp and dressed my burn immediately the dirt and wind were a bit much and by Monday I had developed a bit of an infection (cellulitis).  Once again our posting at probably the best equipped hospital in West Africa was quite a blessing as I was able to walk into the crew physician's office and request a nice course of antibiotics and by Tuesday my redness was beating a hasty retreat. 

Peter's week was filled with many admissions for the newly arrived general and plastic surgeons that were operating up a storm.  They are all so amazed and grateful that they are free to operate all day long without worrying about calls about their patients since Peter and Dr. Fiona do all the admissions work ups as well as take care of their patients post op.  For them - it is a very sweet gig.  Peter and Fiona seem to enjoy the exotic patients with their unusual tumors and their stoic attitudes.  Despite having enormous, body altering surgeries these sturdy people are often up and out of bed the following day and raring to go when it comes to their physical therapy.  Certainly having so many other people on the ward encouraging and supporting them in their recovery has a lot to do with it.  Possibly the din from all the noise is also an inducement to head home as soon as possible. 

I put in another week on the eye team.  Each week has had some interesting developments.  On Wednesday we went to a beautiful church retreat / training site that the team had screened patients at two years ago.  Apparently this time there was a new priest in charge of things who didn't entirely trust our system and was very leery of having hundreds of people in his compound.  In order to honor this man's sensibilities our team leader elected to just have us screen the people out on the street.  This was a test of our plan B and in some ways our plan C capabilities.  We not only had alot of crowd control to do - about 400 people had showed up to be screened - but we had to abbreviate our normal workup which determines what people get seen back at the ship.  Not a huge deal but we'll have more work to do when these folks show up this next week to see if they are really good surgical candidates.  As we used to say back at Camp Pendleton - Semper Gumby!  (Always Flexible)

My other new task this week has been to start working on helping the eye team and to some degree the rest of the ship develop quality management tools, standard operating procedures and hopefully someday accreditation.  Since this is an area of concentration where I have some experience I'm sort of excited to make a difference in this manner.  I spent most of the weekend while Peter was on call digging through file archives and computer records to glean what they already had and see what tools I have access to.  For those of you that haven't already fallen asleep from how boring this sounds let me say I know I'm an oddball for liking this stuff but strangely enough I find it all pretty exciting.  Yup - Bring On Those Spreadsheets I say!!!  OK, I'll calm down now. 

What we have to do in order to get someone to say "AH"

The upside of all this sleuthing was that I actually found some photos of Peter and I from several weeks ago that I can now share since this post is otherwise so boring most will not have read this far.  So - bonus for those of you toughing it out through the QA junk!  Bravo!  Enjoy the pictures and have a wonderful week.  Hopefully we'll have something more interesting if not spine tingling to share next week. 

On rounds with Dr. Gary and the interpreter

My first patient on the Africa Mercy