On the Other Side of the Operating Table

Wednesday and Friday I spent my time at the hospital in the operating theatre. Fortunately, for once I wasn’t the one being operated on! There’s no surgeon at Msambweni District Hospital, but there’s a visiting orthopedic surgeon from Belgium for a bit and the regular doctors actually do quite a few procedures. I got to observe and do some minor assistance, and seeing things from the other side of the operating table was quite an interesting experience. They use spinal anesthesia and keep the patients awake for almost all procedures done here. As somewhat of an anesthesia connoisseur, I was shocked and appalled until I asked one of the doctors about it. She explained that ‘the people here are very mystic, they prefer not to be put asleep all the way’.

I’ve been really enjoying my internship so far. I spent this past week in the Maternal-Child Health ward, and will be there again next week. Then I’ll be moving to the HIV Clinic, and finally to the Maternity/Neonatal Ward. The nurses and doctors are all really welcoming, and it’s so powerful to be learning in such a different environment than I’ve been exposed to with my hospital experiences thus far. People come to the hospital from all of the rural villages on this end of the South Coast, and there’s a desperate need for greater access to healthcare here. You know the patients you’re seeing are underserved when they let a scrotal hydrocephele grow for years until it is literally the size of a football. When they can’t afford the $30 operating room fee and a child’s knee goes unset for days, causing him immeasurable pain. When you weigh 30 babies in a morning and barely make a dent in the nurse’s workload. But it’s so rewarding— the joy of everyone in the room when the baby born by C-Section with meconium in his lungs wailed his first cry was palpable, and I’ve never felt prouder than when I gave 40 babies their oral polio vaccines at an outreach clinic.

The way it was

The way it is now :)

Not my knee being cut open, for once!