What an experience to see a hospital in action in a third world country. I had the privilege once before going to a hospital in India, but this was more intense. Lydia has been working with the hospital in OB-GYN ward and just switched to the Surgery ward. She invited me to come along and observe with her knowing that I majored in Bio Pre-Med. We took a boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) to the hospital, I met the head nurse, dawned a white doctors coat and stethescope and we were on our way. Our duty was to clean the wounds of the patients in the ward. Let me tell you something, what we think of as sterile is not the same as what is in the hospital. Not that things are dirty, but we in America take so many more precautions that Ugandans done have the luxury of doing. It is a good place and they do a good job, but the conditions are so different. Starting in the men’s ward the first patient had been hit in the leg by a boda, fracturing his tibia and fibula…an open fracture at that so you could see the bones. There were other unbelievable things…a young man who had been sitting on the back of a truck and a trailor hit him and took off the lower part of his back and one of his butt cheeks was almost severed. I could see the guys vertebrate, some of his pelvic bone and the top of one femur. As we were cleaning him, he cried and cried, evidentally they stopped giving him morphine one week after he was admitted because he was becoming addicted. So this guy has been copping with the pain of this accident for months. There were old men, young men, young boys in the ward, some in really bad shape, some in good spirits, all in some sort of pain. It is however a cultural thing to not show pain or express noise when in pain so it was silent while the cleaning occurred. The women’s ward was next to care for the women and children who were there. Again things that would have been treated much more aggressively in the States was not the case here. Some of it has to do with the people who are injured, either they wait for a long time to even go to the hospital and thus the damage is much more severe, or there is no money to go to the hospital. And some of it is difference in quality of life. Either way my heart hurt for those women and children. One lady had a ten year history of breast cancer and was just now coming in to get a masectomy. Another lady had an acid burn on her hand, she didn’t come in for treatment straight away and her pinky had to be removed. The top of her hand was fully exposed and I saw muscles, tissue and her bones. We walked through the Pediatrics ward when we were leaving and saw some itty bitty babies, kiddos with massive tumors on their heads, and other kids sick with a variety of things. It made me want to know all things associated with medicine and care for them all.
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