20100830 by Tom

The day started when the portable radio by 630 sounded. It only gave away a sound of heavy winds because we have not found any station on either FM or AM that transmit anything. After a frugal breakfast we went down to the hospital for morning meeting. We arrived five minutes past eight but we were the first people to attend. Soon the room was filling so Maria had a lot of handshaking to do. Dr Okoko was late because his car had a slight mishap so the proceedings were led by dr Chatila. As usual the nurses, giving the report, was mumbling in a not understandable way. We left without having understood a single syllable. Maria went off with Dr Okoko and what was said there you can read in Marias part of the blog.

Tom went to the children’s ward where Timoty was waiting. We had an uneventful round with some discharges. One was a bad burn of one hand were the mother asked to be sent home because she had four more children at home with nobody to look after them. The local health station will have to redress the hand and control how the wrist is positioned. It has to be straight if the boy will ever be able to do anything with that arm. The fingers will probably be quite stiff because of lack of fysiotherapy and adequate treatment. Not to mention the risk of infection in the damaged tissues. The little boy in the emergency room with supposed intracerebral malaria is very sick and will not pull through if you ask me. His parents wanted to take him home but was talked into leaving him with us for the time being. If he goes home and do not have intravenous fluid and antibiotics he will pass out very quickly. Maria entered the ward just before the end of the round and a new set of handshakes took place. We went home for a nice cup of coffee and a good book. We did the preliminary protocol to Marias survey and had it printed out in the MBA office. We tried to communicate via the internet with the help of the English dongle but it was so slow that the cost for the time we spent waiting was too high. We decided to by one of our own, the MTN way not the CAIN way as the English. Hopefully we will have full access to the internet in one week’s time.

In the afternoon I made a very short round and ordered antifungal medicin by mouth to a boy with a very bad lesion in the scalp and one on one wrist, the one in the scalp had been very heavily infected when he came to us but the infection by bacteria is gone now but the fungal one still persists.He will have to eat his medicine for a month or so. We also inspected the autoclave and made I telephone call to Sweden to learn how to try to fix it so that it can be started.

When we came home we had a fight with an enormous amount of small but living cockroaches in the kitchen, especially around the stove. The war is not won yet but will continue.

Maria has started the tale of : There is a lady traveling with a dog. It is the story of our pilgrimage to Santiago.