Fellows Blog: Day 29

Happy Fourth of July!! This morning we celebrated with our fantastic m&m protein balls and by reviewing our presentation for the advanced curriculum. We also found the gifts that we brought for some of our colleagues (Amber had Washington D.C. t-shirts and Haleigh had New York hats) and decided to wear them to celebrate today. Don’t worry, in Uganda there appears to be a tradition of people offering their articles of clothing to friends or even strangers who compliment them. Luckily, we got tons of praise on our outfits, and are very excited to see their reactions when we present our colleagues with them in a couple weeks.

We even had brunch today to celebrate! We pulled some leftover energy bites out of the fridge and made chickpeas with salt and pepper. It was particularly tasty when we crushed saltines on top.

So, our training was supposed to start at 2pm today. Any guesses on what time it actually started? If you guessed close to 4pm, ding ding ding! Winner winner chicken (and chips) dinner. You can escape from Haleigh and Amber’s atrocious cooking at Mukono Resort Hotel. On another note, though, we found some creatures in our supplies… see below for a surprise!

The training went well! Everyone complimented us on how well we knew and presented the information. Kyrillos created the presentation, so he took the lead in teaching, and people thought he was out of med school and practicing medicine already! A brief summary of what’s included in our advanced medical training since we don’t think we ever explained it:

Trauma review

Medical assessment (scene size up, investigating chief complaint, history taking, vitals)

Cardiac emergencies (chest pain, cpr, shock)

Neurological emergencies (stroke, seizure, fainting, dehydration)

Respiratory emergencies (shortness of breath, asthma, pneumothorax (collapsed lung), flail chest (broken ribs))

Gastrointestinal emergencies (abdominal pain, abdominal bleeding, abdominal aortic aneurysm)

Our practical break out groups included ones on patient assessment, cpr, stroke and pneumothorax. We were slightly rushed with the sun setting at 6:57 pm (we didn’t finish until 8:15), but we made it work and the trainees were great in sticking with the information. One thing we’ve noticed here is that people LOVE certificates. We had planned to give out business card-sized certificates upon completing the training, but Hannington is making larger and more official certificates for everyone to hand out tomorrow once everyone has learned the obstetrics curriculum.

After the training, we went to our favorite restaurant to get— yep— a large plate of rice. Amber and Haleigh combined could only eat half of the one plate rice they split before getting nauseous, but somehow Kyrillos ate his entire plate. We also discussed possible excursions we could take when our schedule is more free before we leave, but we still need to make definitive plans. On the way back, we got some sugarcane (what else is new) and listened to some music on Kyrillos’ speaker. Our nauseous had miraculously vanished by the time we got home, so Kyrillos put his domestic green flag to good use and graciously made us ramen.

More importantly, while Isaac the Gecko has been missing in action, Sir Demitri William Atticus Scooby-Doo the Great has made a terrifying return to the airbnb. He’s scampering too fast for us to get pictures and is about the size of Amber’s hand… yeah.

Tripleting

Taken at summer gardens: red flowers, blue flowers, white clouds, blue sky… all because of 4th of July!

We were very disturbed at first to find something moving in our bag of supplies, but were then delighted to find this adorable kitten (there were actually three of them in there!)

Haleigh’s supposed pulse ranged between 50 and 100 today depending on who was taking it …. probably not the most accurate but at least it showed the normal range of heart rates!

Practicing CPR to the tune of “stayin alive”… Kyrillos stole Amber’s fifteen seconds on fame

Hannington’s sister is planning on making a video of our project, so Haleigh was called away during training to give a brief interview

Showing a seizure video during training

Kyrillos’ lung diarama to demonstrate a pneumothorax (peep the fabric clumped together for a heart)

The sun set a while before we were done with training but it was actually easier to see the PowerPoint slides that way!

Kyrillos is surprisingly good at taking selfies #dinnersquad

#eleventhdayofrice

George William and Devir feeding sugarcane to our handsome Cornelius Giovanni “Gio” Harrison, in spite of Amber warning them about it being a choking hazard.