Surgery Doesn't Stop on Weekends

6/14/14
Most everyone left early this morning for the trip back to Dar or on Safari.  I had an easy morning, making pancakes with some friends, doing laundry, and lounging in the deck.

In the afternoon, I went to the hospital, and though there were no C-sections happening, surgery was extremely busy.  I first watched the end of a basic hernia surgery, which wasn't too extraordinary, but then after watched surgeons drain abscesses from a women's left leg and right breast.  They literally cut into her legs and drained her legs of milky white puss that filled tray after tray... there was so much fluid, it was disgusting.  The surgeon followed the same procedure for her breast.  Must say, I was not expecting to see abscesses that large... they drained about 3+ liters of liquid which was the color and consistency of milk.

Right when we all thought the day couldn't get any better, there was an emergency exploratory abdominal surgery that was done by Dr. Rahib (the doctor who had done the abscess surgery as well... it was a busy day for him).  A 33 year old man was brought into the operating room on a stretcher and he was vomiting greenish/yellow liquid through a tube in his nose and into the attached bag.  His stomach was severely distended and when Dr. Rahib cut into him, more of the green liquid pored from him and onto the floor.  There was so much that it got all over the doctors and nurses and covered the floor (we quickly learned that the green fluid was vegetables and other food that had been digested in the stomach and leaked into the abdomen, causing it to swell.  For the next 2 hours, Dr. Rahib cleaned the abdominal cavity with saline solution and meticulously scraped the intestines of a brownish skin coating that had resulted from inflammation.  While cleaning the intestines, he found a hole in one area, which was causing the man's food to leak into the abdominal cavity.  They cut around the hole to clean it up a bit and then sutured it closed.  Meanwhile, the man's bladder was extremely full because of all the IV fluid and when they tried, they could not insert a catheter because his penis had undergone trauma.  As a result, Dr. Rahib was forced to surgically insert the catheter into the man's bladder, with the tube and bag coming out near the belly button.  Then they sutured up the abdomen, though not completely (just the muscle and not the skin) in case of infection and to be able to easily remove the catheter in a couple days.  By the end, the surgery took almost 3 hours, and was by far one of the most interesting procedures I have seen thus far.

By the time we left the hospital, it was about 6pm, so we walked to the Masai Market so one of my friends could pick up her pants that were being made and then to Warthogs's where we got some pizzas (I went with the typical onion, pepper, sweet corn, and pineapple... such a weird combination, but nothing gets much better).  We got back to the house just before sunset and then made some chocolate cake from a mix (turns out they have Pillsbury in Tanzania) before calling it a night.  Definitely a pretty perfect day.