Friday we woke up refreshed after having been able to leave the hospital and have a more relaxed evening the night before. We had a clinic that morning and a couple of cases lined up for that afternoon. Looked like it would be a pretty reasonable day and we would likely have the chance to leave the hospital again that night. The most interesting clinic patient that morning was a girl we had seen earlier in the week with DDH. She came in with the xrays that she had to pay for since our free machine has not been working. The xrays showed definite DDH and the girl and her family were told to come back in two weeks when Dr. Dietrich returned as he has much more experience with fixing chronic DDH.
Our first operative case was a woman who needed removal of antibiotic beads. Since we had a case earlier in the week with difficult to find beads and another case in which no beads were actually present to remove, we took some c-arm xray shots before giving her anesthesia to make sure that (1) the beads were present and (2) where they were located prior to starting our case. Surprise, surprise, this woman did not have any beads anywhere in her femur. She did, however, have sutures that had been left in for two months and were encased in a combination of scab, scar tissue, and some foreign body granulomas. So I spent the next 20+ minutes trying my best to remove all her suture while Pat talked with her family to try to figure out why this patient was scheduled for a bead removal when she clearly did not have any beads in her body. After that frustration, we got to the femoral intertrochanteric fracture fixation. Pat and Dr. Alexi did a DHS for fixation while I again served as our xray tech. It’s interesting because in the US, I am not allowed to push the button to take an xray. The case went smoothly and we finished around dinnertime and headed to the Auberge for another round of pizza and Prestige.
The interesting and endearing(?) thing about the Auberge is that you never really know what you are going to get when you order from there. Apparently that night they were out of pizza so we were forced to look elsewhere on the menu for dinner. The strange thing was that after we were told they were out of pizza, we saw two different groups of people leave carrying pizza boxes. What we ordered were Prestige for everyone, two chef salads, three orders of fries, and 2 orders of rice&beans. What we got was Prestige for everyone, one chef salad. Two orders for fries (one small and burnt, the other large and plump), a basket of bread, and 2 orders of rice&beans. We also ordered a couple of papaya juices which from a distance looks like delicious milkshakes. When you take a sip from this milkshake-looking drink, you immediately discover that it’s warm. And if you can imagine the smell of an operating room crowded with sweaty people mixed with used 4x4 gauze, you know what this warm drink tastes like. Pat somehow managed to drink most of his. Amy and I gave up very quickly and stuck to the Prestige. All in all it was a fun night and we looked forward to our outing the following day as the wind down of our first week in Haiti.
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| Fries??? |
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| good fries vs bad fries with papaya juice in the foreground |
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| L DDH in 3 yo F |
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