(Author's note) All units and measurements are written (and will continue to be written) in the metric system. Personally, I know the conversions, but I'm not going to do them for a multiplicity of reasons including but not limited to:
- You can do them yourself (it'll be good for you)
- The Imperial system is retarded anyways
- Quite frankly, the word "Celsius" just slides off the tongue so sweetly that I'd prefer never to say (or have to remember how to spell) "Fahrenheit" again.
I
spent most of the day helping Samuel in the pharmacy. He's a nurse but they
have no pharmacist. I arranged the drugs so they're easier to find, and he sent
me home with the pharmacology reports on about 8 different drugs and wants me
to remember what they're used to treat. He's probably a little older than me,
maybe 24 or 25. He also sees patients for minor
surgery, vaccinations, and wound dressing. Today, I watched him do a wound
dressing and two vaccinations... [The junior] doctor dropped off an urgent prescription to be filled for an inpatient. Samuel was in a meeting with Dr. Bellosillo, so I had to do it
myself. I had only briefly seen him do it once before, and inpatient scrips are typically a lot
larger than outpatient (for instance, drip kit, IV fluid, syringes, canulas,
and sterile water are all things that you wouldn't give to an outpatient,
but the hospital needs pretty regularly.
Also, when the scrip calls for certain medications, you're supposed to
automatically know how many sterile waters and syringes etc. they'll need. I
didn't!). Well, I knew where to find about 50% of the things on the list (it's
hard to read the Doctors' handwriting in the first place), and was still
working on filling the rest of the order when the semi-frantic nurse needing
the supplies came in. I had spent 30 minutes working on finding what was
ordered, one item of which we ended up not having, so I could have searched for
an eternity and not found it. The poor nurse had to help me find the last few
things, and helped herself to all the syringes she needed. I knew I needed to
write down how much of everything was taken, but I had to dig deep to remember
WHERE to write it. Still no sign of Samuel, but she took the needed supplies
and my blood pressure started its journey back to normal. Later I think the junior doctor may have gotten mad at the nurse for not administering the medications
soon enough (can't be sure because he was speaking in French and Samuel only
gave me a rough partial translation). I felt really badly that she may have
gotten in trouble, but it's only my second day! Even later, I found that I'd neglected to write down the supplies taken on the
patient's billing record (I'd only written it in the pharmacy's stock record),
so I had to go back and record the supplies while the nurse was administering
them. Anyway, I was a bit stressed out for about an hour, but it pulled me out
of my afternoon coma feeling (now I really know I'm getting used to the time).
All told, I kind of like the pharmacy when things are interesting. Filling
prescriptions is fun, but Samuel does all the recording, which is probably the
boring part. Everything is recorded by hand, no computer in the pharm department, so it's ultra tedious!
30/9/2015
While eating my lunch, I scrubbed off an orange and took it outside onto my porch to eat so I
didn't make a mess inside. I was sitting cross-legged with it and the knife,
and when I returned from my lunch break the staff was laughing and saying I was a Muslim. I inquired as to why, and they said the way I sat on the
ground cross-legged it looked like I was praying. I asked them how they sit on
the ground, and they said they don't. That seemed funny to me, although I guess
as dirty as it is here, you'd at the very least want to be thoughtful about
where you sit! I showed Samuel a video that I took on my iPad this last summer of the
demolition derby at the StanCo fair. The look on his face was priceless! I explained
how it worked to him, and of course this concept had never even occurred to him.
1/10/2015
Today
the only really exciting thing that happened in the clinic was that an ~7 year
old boy had a seizure in the waiting room. His frantic father and he were
escorted back to the minor surgery room where Samuel tried to calm him down. I
quickly got a 5cc syringe and a dose of diazepam for the kid (and I knew just where to find it! Yessssss), all the while his
father was yelling "Jesus! Jesus!". He wasn't just using it as an exclamation either. I don't know that this father is
necessarily a believer, but from what I could tell, he thought his child was
having some sort of Mephistophelian attack. He was calling upon Jesus, not just saying the name. The head nurse, doctor, and Samuel all assured
him at different times that it was only a convulsion, but this dad wasn't
taking any chances. Believers or not, the people here seem to know that there
is power in the name of Jesus, which I found to be a cool lesson all in itself. On a grander scope, spiritualism is very real here, and people are acutely aware of it (some are even taken advantage of using fear tactics, but that's another story)
TL;DR
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| My "office". The book in the center is where I enter outpatient info, the pharmacy is in the door to the right. |
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| Eventually I will run out of sweet rides to photograph, but that day is not today! Here we see a Toyota Land-Cruiser (yeah that's a snorkel) parked in the hospital parking area. The other day I saw a pretty new Jaguar E-type parked on the street as I was walking, but not in a safe place to stop and photograph (busy road Mom, not muggers or Boko Haram) |
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| Me in the pharmacy, ready for action |
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| Samuel in the pharmacy ready for... modelling shoot? The perspective makes him look like an oompa-loompa compared to me, he's really only 6 or 7 inches shorter than me |
Great authors note!
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