Day 7, Today was my first official day of work, it didn’t get off to the best of starts when the water stopped working at 7am. I was assured this wasn’t a common occurrence but it was inauspicious at the least. Thirsty, grumpy and unshowered I trudged up the hill to work. The morning began with a grand round in paediatrics before one of the every so monthly mortality meetings. The descriptions of some of the deaths and the travails the entailed were not encouraging.
I was then shown to the ward but my colleagues were based elsewhere for the morning. I was back doing ward rounds, no house officers and no clue how to get things done, on my lonesome. I persisted with what I knew (or at least thought I knew) and started seeing the patients, unsurprisingly all but one had HIV and TB. The degree to which they have to be ill before being admitted is remarkable considering the nonsense we end up admitting to be defensible. But by that same token how many patients here are being sent to home with a degree of doubt in their prognosis? Any hospital in the NHS and the patients I were seeing would be under a specialist Infectious Disease team, here that was me that had to figure out what to do with the cryptococcal meningitis.
In the afternoon I was covering the outpatients. Essentially this encompasses the A+E department, the GP surgery for the local area and routine appointments for all specialities. Despite the sheer workload the most frustrating aspect of the OPD is not having enough translators. There is only so much Sawbonna (Hello) can tell you about a patient’s 3 weeks of coughing and I ended up spending about half of the time trying to convince the nurses to help me.
The day was not as dramatic as it could have been and it was a fairly gentle introduction, but that maybe because I have yet to interview for this job. That will be sometime this week, would be a short blog if was unable to continue! The days will get harder especially as I become on call; let’s just hope the shower is working tomorrow.
This puts things in context - I suppose those who say certain UK A+Es are "like 'Nam" should just man-up!
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ReplyDeleteFunny how we take running water and access to health care for granted until we read things like this..
ReplyDeleteSounds like you survived your first day. well done