Thursday - Week 3

I woke up this morning at about 6:30 to something buzzing in my ear. I wasn’t ready to get up yet so I put my ear plugs in my ears. For some reason I thought that whatever it was would decide to fly into my ear and then get stuck there. Apparently it was more interested in my forehead than my ears because when I finally got out of bed I had two big welts on my forehead. They aren’t red or itchy so I’m not too worried. We arrived at the hospital around 8:30 and began our day in the AIDs Relief clinic taking glucose levels and vital signs. We now have a total of 20 patients enrolled in our research. We still want to hit our target of 30, but we are happy that we will at least have 20.

            Once we ran out of testing strips, we decided to go to peds and join in on rounds with the peds team. We saw some of the patients we had seen before. We also saw a little girl from the AIDs Relief clinic. When she saw us, she recognized us right away and started waving and calling for us to come over. She was the little girl that we walked over to casualty from the clinic on Tuesday.

            After rounds with peds, Isaac arranged for us to see a surgery with Dr. Bird, one of the general surgeons here at Kijabe. We changed into clean scrubs, hair nets, and shoe covers before entering the theatre. The surgery that we got to see was the removal of a goiter, or a thyroidectomy. This woman’s thyroid had grown so large that it had pushed its way down into her chest and had displaced her trachea. Normally the thyroid sits just below your Adam’s apple. They prepped the entire chest just in case the sternum had to be split open to remove the thyroid! Dr. Bird is from Australia so of course he has an awesome accent. While he worked he would quiz Neeli and I about anatomy and which structures he needed to be careful of. We had probably been in the OR for about 45 minutes when Neeli told me she needed to go outside of the room to get some fresh air. She felt like she couldn’t breathe through the face mask. Next thing I knew, out of the corner of my eye I see some commotion and arms flailing around. I rushed out of the OR with a couple of nurses and they already had Neeli on an open bed. She had fainted about 2 seconds after stepping outside of the OR. One of the Kenyan nurses asked her if she had taken tea and when Neeli told her no, she was like, “Oh, well no wonder you fainted!” That’s when they sent us up to the doctor’s lounge to have some chai. Chai is like their cure-all here. Neeli was a really good sport. She was even laughing at herself saying that it was a good thing she left the OR when she did! After we finished our chai, I went back to the OR for a little while and Neeli decided to go back to the AIDs Relief clinic. I stayed in the OR for about another hour or so before my stomach told me I better leave and get some lunch before I fainted too.

            For lunch, I had chips (French fries) and a samosa at the cafeteria with Neeli and Caley. Since we didn’t have lunch until about 2:30, there wasn’t much else for us to do around the hospital when we finished. We wandered around a bit, but gave up a little bit before 4 and went home. We sat around and read our books until Dr. Keiser and Caley came over for dinner. We made English muffin pizzas, which actually turned out pretty good! They were just like big bagel bites. The pizza crust we bought at Nakumat about a week ago had already gotten moldy so we had to improvise. After Dr. Keiser and Caley left, Neeli and I got back to our daily routine of reading, boiling water, showering, and checking our emails –then bed!