The Horn of Africa

Everyone here naps from 1p-4p, but I'm not really tired then. Or at least not usually. When we have an emergency in the middle of the night, the nap the next day is nice. I'm not "on call," really, because I'm not one of the physicians, but I've asked all the doctors to send someone to wake me up if there're emergencies during the night. At 1am, or whatever, someone pounds on my door, "David! David! There is a c-section... you come quick!"

 

So life here for the past few days has been more of the same. More D&Cs, more c-sections. We got two stroke patients in the medical ward. There's so little we can do for them without a CT scanner. We treat the symptoms and tell the family to keep trying to talk to them and keep trying to get them to move those arms and legs.

 

I was back at Hargeisa Group Hospital again on Tuesday for surgery. We did the urethra repair that was bumped on Sunday, removed a bladder stone from a one year old (no shit -- but there it was), placed a three-way catheter in an old man with a hypertrophic prostate (he's too weak to have survived a full prostatectomy), and then removed a bullet from the leg of a man who was shot in Ethiopia.

 

The last was the most interesting to me simply because of boyish fantasies surrounding removing bullets from people. I wanted to keep the bullet, but of course the patient wanted it to show his friends. "...and then! Bam! Right into my leg! This is the actual bullet!" Add appropriate embellishments until the story attains heroic proportions.