Tuesday September 3

      I admit that I like my creature comforts, so last night was not the best for me. I slept in the bedroom next to the diesel generator, but as long as my earplugs stayed in it was tolerable. Unfortunately keeping them in was something of a chore which was repeated several times during the night. The other item was my air conditioner, which was fixed during the day so I shouldn't complain...but the remote has been lost so my two choices are to either leave it off or have an arctic wind blowing across me. So I got up several time to turn it off or on, and those times pretty much coincided with when my earplugs fell out !
      On arriving at the OR we expected to have 2 cases to do today, but discovered that 5 were booked for us. The first was the 2 week old baby with an imperforate anus and CDH that we examined yesterday; Jonathan and Diego did a colostomy on him, so sow hopefully he can eat and gain some weight prior to having his CDH repaired. He will also likely need a pull through for his imperforate anus, and then sometimes after that he would have his colostomy taken down and normal bowel function restored. It's hard to imagine how all of that is going to happen here, but we remain hopeful. It took forever to get that case started because of problems with machinery, problems with his IV, and just problems in general. I went to the Outpatient Clinic for a while and we admitted 2 young men for ostomy decommissioning.
     One of the unanticipated cases for us was a 30 year old woman with a bad gallbladder which has been in the hospital for over a week awaiting surgery. Dr. Moses made the interesting comment that cholelithiasis is a surgical disease, but cholecystitis is a medical problem. I explained that we don't think about it that way, and that the quickest way to cure cholecystitis is to remove the gallbladder. So that is what John and I did, after waiting an hour for electricity to be restored to the outlets in the room, and thus the anesthesia machine regained power as did the Bovie and the portable surgical lights ( the overhead lights are dead). Once we got started it went relatively smoothly.
     Diego and Jonathan did an appendectomy, and then John and I finished our day with a hernia repair. We left the hospital to go to the dorm to use the Internet, which was interminably slow, and then we came home for dinner. After dinner Dr McDonald picked me up for a return visit to my house call of last night. I did a small procedure and then came home.Larry Kim had arrived after a long journey through Paris; he will be going out to Phebe tomorrow.