Friday March 8

Today was another busy day. John and I did a 2 year old with a right inguinal hernia, followed by a friend of Barbu's with an umbilical hernia which we are hoping will be a One Day Surgery. Then we did almost bizarre case of a 40 year old man with a mass in his thigh for a year. He denied any pain, antecedent trauma, or systemic symptoms. An ultrasound showed a 20 cm mass which was mixed cystic and solid, and the radiologist suggested that it might be an abscess. That seemed unlikely to me since it wasn't particularly painful, it had been present for a year, and he had no fever or systemic symptoms. So we explored to find out what it was, and indeed it was an abscess...extending from halfway down his thigh to way up in his retroperitoneum. There were chunks of debris, leading. Us to think we were doing a pancreatic necrosectomy. We ended up putting 2 chest tubes in as drains. It was so much fun to see John so excited by the weirdness of the case !! We met up with Robert from the Eye Clinic and gave him the glasses and glucose test strips from Karen. It was very good to see him again, and we will try to have dinner next week. While we were doing all that, Santiago and Nathan did skin grafts on a little boy with thigh burns, and then a thyroidectomy. When they finished that, we went downstairs to check on our patients and then came home to change. We went back to the hospital to attend a long service and retirement ceremony for employees of JFK. Mr. Hne, the anesthetist, was being honored for 31 years of service, and sadly he will be retiring soon. It's amazing to think that he and many of the other honorees stayed around throughout the civil war years; it's hard to imagine what life was like in those times. He invited us to attend a couple of days ago, and it was easy to see that he was thrilled we were there. After that we came back here for dinner. We were thinking about going out with Wilfred to Sajj for karaoke or something, but I am dead tired. This morning I was a bit under the weather with a GI disturbance as well as aches and maybe a fever; I feel much better tonight, but I think I won't push things too far. We have one case scheduled for tomorrow morning, and then in the afternoon we are going to see Harriett !!