Seeing Everything

6/18/14
It was especially hard to get up this morning.  On top of not getting enough sleep on Sunday and Monday night, I have gotten a sore throat and cough (probably TB), which is also wiping me out.  We had the weekly hospital meeting, which involved a brief lecture on non-communicable diseases and how the hospital was adapting and expanding in order to better treat patients with these diseases.  Then we did the regular rounds in pediatrics, and though we covered the other wing in the hospital, we only saw about 9 patients (so it went really quick) and most of the kids just had pneumonia or respiratory tract infections... nothing unusual or out of the ordinary like we had hoped.

In the afternoon, I went back to the hospital and wandered to OB and surgery and finally OPD because nothing was happening in the other two.  Here I saw a boy get a "back stab" on his leg.  This is pretty much a cast that doesn't go all the way around the leg, but stabilizes the joints so that the fracture can heal.  The boy was about 4 or 5 and had a small fracture by his knee.  It was also good to learn that a "back stab" isn't actually what it says because I had previously seen it written in the chart detailing the patient conditions and assumed there were a lot of back stabbings in Tanzania... good to know this is not the case.  They next patient was driven up to OPD in a large car and wheeled in on a stretcher.  The man looked to be in his late 50's and was very large in both height and weight.  He wasn't moving when they put him on the stretcher, but I saw his eyes rolling back when they wheeled him to the minor surgery theater.  I watched the doctor who had put on the little boy's cast come back into the room (he had been about to leave the hospital) and take the man's bp and pulse.  After several tense minutes he spoke in Swahili to the nurse and 2 male relatives in the room and then turned to me and my friend and told us "dead body".  I haven't really seen anyone die so far, besides the bodies in the morgue, so this was pretty eye-opening.  The doctors said he was pretty much already gone by the time the man got there, though they didn't do anything to really help him... they just checked his vitals and accepted the fact that he was dead.

After that, I took it easy the rest of the day... seeing a man die was a pretty shocking experience.