Wednesday March 7

March 7

   They are really going all out for us in the bungalow this trip. Welke, whom we knew from the Presidential Guest House last year, has been at the Bungalow to take care of us for breakfast and dinner. I think the meals are prepared at the Guest House and then brought to us. It really is very nice!
   After breakfast we went to the hospital to make rounds. To my surprise and distress, the older man with the possible bowel obstruction whom we decided to observe overnight had expired. I'm not sure what happened, and there is no way to find out, but it's disconcerting to say the least. On the brighter side, the man with the liver abscess that we drained yesterday looked fantastic and was obviously very pleased with his surgery !
    Then we went to the OR to start our day. A child with a recurrent hernia, a woman with a breast lump which is probably cancer ( I'm bringing a piece of it home for our pathologists to look at), Santiago did an EUA on a complicated colo-rectal patient, the trauma patient from Redemption who probably had an extraperitoneal bladder rupture, and then a liver abscess which turned out to be a right renal cyst. We had more cases scheduled, but time ran out; in fact, we were only able to do the liver abscess with a lot of begging and pleading the anesthetists. One of the big problems is that there is no nurse staffing the PACU/ Recovery Room, so the patients are all recovered in the OR. Thus it was an hour between finishing the boys hernia and doing the breast lump as we waited for the boy to recover so he could go back downstairs to the ward.
    This morning Welke told us that we would be having dinner at the Presidential Guest House, but I asked Adamah about it a couple of times and he wasnt able to confirm it. Apparently former British Prime Minister Tony Blair dropped into town for a visit, and was meeting with
Madame President, so there was some thought that plans had changed. So we got Dewalt to  drive us to Sajj...but then right after we ordered Adamah called to invite us to the Guest Houe to meet his cousin Elias and his wife Cora and the group with them who are going out to the Toade Mission School which we visited last year. It was a pleasant evening, and then Dewalt drove us back to the bungalow where some of the unbeaten food from Sajj was eaten. Then to bed.