Fellows Blog: Day 21
We began the morning with a text from Hannington saying we were already late for our day’s program. Devir picked us up a little bit later only for us to walk in circles looking for the van… only for us to ditch the van altogether and walk to the clinic. On this journey, Amber and Haleigh got jealous of Kyrillos calling Devir “Divo”, Timothy “Timo” and Kyrillos being “Kiro,” so we made an executive decision to don the new nicknames “Ambo” and “Heyo.”
Our morning consisted of walking to a bunch of different clinics and hospitals distributing incident report forms for the boda bodas. In order to see how often our trainees are actually bringing patients to definitive care and how effective our program is, we have the boda bodas fill out a form whenever they arrive at the hospital or clinic. This includes information about the patient, their injury, interventions performed and the responder’s id number to connect the LFR to our records. There’s also a spot for the hospital staff to fill out information about how the patient’s mechanism of injury and how they arrived. The VTCA team will go around and collect these sheets every week or two and send them back to us for data analysis.
Next, Hannington had a surgery case for a necrosed finger that needed to be amputated, which we were all eager to see. The patient had gotten their finger caught in a machine, and the bone was crushed. We watched the finger amputation and were shocked by how different it was than what we had pictured. First, the patient was not put under general anesthesia— instead, Hannington used a local anesthetic and injected lidocaine as the nerve block. This process entailed dragging a needle through the patient’s wrist and finger and hand- it looked very painful for the patient, but we suppose getting your finger cut off would hurt even more. The actual amputation part was done one tiny chunk at a time, alternating between pieces of flesh, muscle, and bone. They didn’t have bone saws, or a blade sharp enough to do a smooth cut in one go.
Let’s just say it was a little tough to watch for all three of us- Amber nearly vomited as Hannington was administering the local anesthetic, Kyrillos had learned from his prior shadowing experience and intermittently left the room, and Haleigh had a syncopal episode towards the end. Luckily, Amber was standing behind her and managed to catch her before she hit the ground, and once she came to Kyrillos gave her water and fed her a granola bar. She recovered almost immediately and decided to actually eat breakfast before the next time she goes into an OR :)
After surgery, we went for a quick lunch, where Kyrillos became best friends with our waiter by speaking Arabic. We learned that he did some training in Saudi Arabic for fast food. He worked in Burger King and wished that he could make for us his specialty burger - the Whopper. He explained to us that he enjoyed his time at home, here in Mukono, much better than his time in Saudi’s Arabia because of the freedom that comes with living in Uganda. During his stay in Saudi Arabia, there were a lot of restrictions.
Also at lunch, Kyrillos ordered Fanta and they presented him with a plastic or glass option. He asked “what’s your favorite?” to the waiter, only to be met with the response of “this is plastic and this is glass”. The waiter came over and asked if it was okay that the order will take a long time because it was being made fresh. Upon asking how long it would take, he said 5-7 minutes - fast food indeed! This waiter also said only Amber could handle the chili sauce that came with our meal because her Indian background— “I’ve met people from all places”—, which we found somewhat ironic after last night’s fiasco.
We may have been twenty minutes late to our own meeting that we greatly emphasized everyone should be exactly on time for, but we just see it as embracing the local culture. But alas, only two of the twelve people were there when we arrived, so no worries! We got started with our presentation on how our pre and post test data was looking, and then had all the TOTs practice giving parts of the presentation while we provided feedback. Kyrillos led some fun scenarios to practice the ABCs, and we think all the TOTs feel a lot more confident in their abilities and comfortable with the material!
We went to a new restaurant for dinner, where we had beans and chapati. It was not only fantastic-tasting but also very filling. It’s very close to our place so we’re definitely hoping to go back soon! See a clip from our walk home here.
Other news, after seeing a boda boda carry an entire couch today, we learned they can hold up to 500 kg (1102 lbs!!). Devir tried to convince us that eight people can fit on one boda boda, but we don’t believe him, and we won’t be trying it anytime soon.
We’d also like to clarify that, despite popular belief from our parents, we did not meet the President of Uganda. His picture is just up in a lot of places and we took a photo with it. Sorry to disappoint you.
A view from our walk in circles! Photography credits go to, you guessed it, our amateur photographer Amber!
Surgery supplies, featuring the iodine to disinfect the injury and the lidocaine they used for local anesthesia.
We think our daily outfits should be scrubs and boots now… thoughts?
Two of our TOTs practicing teaching our training!
Amber being the worst kind of bystander while Kyrillos acted as a patient…. featuring Kyrillos’ hat. #whoworeitbetter
Kyrillos pretending to be impaled in the stomach while Haleigh reenacted the time she passed out less than three hours ago.
The boys challenged Amber to game of pool today! She narrowly lost, but only after Devir recruited Kyrillos to help him towards the end of game. However, she is determined to beat Devir, George William, Yasin, and Jacob single-handedly before she returns back to the states. In her defense, the pool balls here are slightly smaller and there’s no chalk for the stick.
Beans and chapati! Was much more appetizing than it looks.
Amber’s puppy, Dolce, is officially 2 years old! Her family sent this adorable picture of the doggo in her birthday outfit enjoying a pupachino. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!