Time flies!

            I can’t believe it, but we are already half-way through with our time here at Kijabe. Today was a pretty good day. We started the day off by searching for the medical director, Dr. Achieng, because we were told she wanted to meet with us at 8:30. After we finally found her, she told us that we would be able to do our metabolic syndrome screening research as a small pilot project on about 20 or 30 patients. Although we expected to be able to do it on 200-300 patients, we are happy to at least get something out of it. I think we will be starting either tomorrow or next Monday. Once we finished talking with Dr. Achieng, we went to the women’s ward for rounds with Dr. Mireille and Dr. Shirley. We saw one woman who came in to have surgery for a ventral hernia, but had suffered complications and is now in a comma like state. Her wound had broken open and was also most likely infected. I also saw a patient with an aspergillus lung infection, listened to the galloping heart beat of another patient, and saw several others with less interesting findings. One patient had become delirious during her stay in the hospital and could be heard moaning and screaming throughout the hospital.

            At 1pm we went to conference and had lunch during it. I ate mostly potatoes and cabbage. I tried the beef stew, but it was pretty unappetizing this time. After lunch we went home to take a bathroom break. None of the bathrooms in the hospital have any toilet paper. Our maid was there doing our laundry and dishes for us – OK, I guess we aren’t suffering too much while we are here! Our maid also showed us how to turn on the oven!! Yay! We made pizza for dinner and it was pretty good!

            We spent the afternoon in the AIDs Relief clinic seeing patients with Mwaura. One patient had a lipoma on his back and Mwaura joked with him saying that it only needed to be removed if his wife couldn’t stand it. The other patient we saw was an HIV positive patient with a CD4 count of only 14. That is extremely low and she is susceptible to practically any and all opportunistic infections. They were worried she might have cryptococcal meningitis so Mwaura did a lumbar puncture to get some CSF. This time the LP was successful and 3 little vials of CSF were obtained.

            We got home around 5 pm and got a visit from Grace and Beatrice. Grace sells beaded jewelry, stone figurines, and other souvenirs. Beatrice sold us some english muffins. It’s nice when you don’t even need to leave your front door to do some shopping! While we made our pizza we watched Modern Family that we had been streaming all day so that the whole episode could load. And that’s about it for today!