Day 8

I was up at 8 this morning, but realized that I hadn’t made plans with Dewalt to be picked up. Today was another holiday (President’s Day), and I didn’t want to wake him early, so I walked from the Guest House to the hospital, which is about a mile I would guess. It’s a straight shot down Tubman Boulevard. I must say that I attracted a few stares as a white guy walking in scrubs on the busiest road in Monrovia ! After arriving at the OR for our 9 AM case, we were informed that there would be a delay because both of the elevators had broken again. The OR is on the top (4th) floor, so they would have no way of getting the patients up and down. We suggested that they could walk up, but walking down stairs after surgery wasn’t a likely option. It turns out that the best elevator repairman lived in Ghana, and he used to come fix there elevators, but he died a couple of months ago. So now they use someone of the Ivory Coast. However in this particular circumstance, since both elevators stopped at the same time, they are thinking it is an electrical/power supply problem rather than an elevator problem per se. In any case we made rounds, and then the word was that the elevators wouldn’t be fixed today, so we might as well cancel our 2 cases. We told the patients, and they were disappointed, as we expected. Then we were on the stairs to leave when we met Adaman, and we told him our story of woe. He basically said that’s bullshit, that you guys are here to help, and people should do everything they can. So he called the administrator Dr. McDonald, who suggested that the patients could walk up, and then stay in the recovery room until either the elevators were fixed or the patient could walk down;

So we ended up doing our 2 cases: an incisional hernia and another locally advanced breast cancer. By the time we had finished the breast, the elevators were fixed !! The mastectomy went better than the last, or at least there was less blood loss. It came out well, I think.

We had an amazing downpour yesterday evening as we were waiting to go out to dinner. It was a hard rain, made even more significant by the sound of the rain on the metal roofs ! We went for dinner at PA’s, a sports bar of sorts, and had a good time. Then I went back to the Guest House. Senora started showing me “Liberia : America’s Stepchild” which appears to be a PBS production, but I fell asleep on the couch. She woke me up, and I ended up going to bed at 9:30 PM and sleeping very well !