The hospital hasn’t been too busy this week. I’ve had quite a few baby checks to do though, and have thankfully managed to pick up a couple of heart murmurs and one baby with talipes (club foot) which Dr Zotei (the doc with a paeds interest) confirmed so at least I know I’m doing them right. There’s one poor little baby with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) and an encephalocele who has failed to respond to any medication so they’ve been discharged to spend time at home until he gets sicker. It’s very sad, but there’s nothing they can do for him as it’d cost AUS$30,000 to get him to Brisbane for an operation and even then, the operation may not be effective.
The general ward has been much the same as usual although one patient may be going into renal failure but there’s not really any way to know for sure seeing as they can’t do the blood tests. There was one man who came in on Sunday night who had got his hand caught between a rock and a hard place (literally) and ended up losing 2½ fingers. He was working at a logging company and is one of many examples of why Health and Safety precautions might be a good idea here. Luckily they brought him in within 30mins, so his hands were stitched up quickly and nothing seems to be infected. Another man had a large laceration on the back of his calf last weekend, but because he was out at sea, he took 3 days to get to us and it all looked a bit messy by the time it was stitched. Otherwise, there were a couple of cases of malaria and TB which is fairly normal here.
I spent much of today in outpatients which was fun because you get to pretty much manage your own patients. I referred anything interesting to the doctor, but got to diagnose and treat the minor stuff and even managed to speak a little bit of Pidjin – I’m sure they were laughing at me on the inside but they were very polite and pretended to understand.
No comments:
Post a Comment