Surgery and Shooters

6/12/14
This morning rounds were relatively uninteresting... the 3 other girls and I in in the internal medicine ward, now know the patients and each of their cases relatively well, so doing rounds for 3 hrs each day on a small group of the same patients can get really repetitive.

Since it was Thursday, though, it was another surgery day, so I spent the afternoon in surgery.  In one of the operating rooms there was an 8 year old boy who had fallen into a pit of hot ashes and burned most of the skin off his lower legs and knees.  There were some places you could see the bone, and his legs were extremely raw even though the doctors had already been doing skin grafts for about 6 months.  They had been using his thighs for the skin grafts and attaching the grafts to his knees where skin was slowly starting to scab and grow.  The doctors were supposed to do another graft today, but the boy had developed an infection and they were washing his legs with a strong antiseptic that made them bleed profusely, and then carefully wrapped them back up.  Since he is so small, the skin grafting is going to be a slight problem because they have already taken almost all the skin they can from his thighs and aware going to have to move to his butt and back.  This was a really gruesome procedure, but by far one of the most interesting things I have seen thus far.

We got back to the house in time for our last global health lecture, then we had our weekly BBQ around the 2 fire pits outside, and around 9, a group of us went to a local bar/club called Shooters.  This was actually a lot more fun. Than I anticipated and we were also able to watch the majority of the Brasil/Croatia World Cup game before going back to the house.