This week has been a bit more
chilled, partly cos I was ill so missed half of it, but
also cos a whole load of doctors arrived last week, giving about double the
number than before, which is great.
I’ve been on paeds this week
which is good, but a little out of my comfort zone. About 80% of them have
malaria though, so I’m pretty comfortable with that now!
Cute Kids in town:
Me with some of the other doctors/volunteers + local kids
As I said before, Mondays, Wednesdays + Fridays are clinic days. They're usually really busy. The patients start lining up at 5.30am to register. At some point in the morning they get their blood pressure and weight checked.
Then they wait in this porch area until they're seen by one of us. Clinic usually finishes around 6pm so many of the patients are waiting for hours and hours. There's no appointments, I think it's basically first come first serve.
This is me at my clinic desk that I share with one of the medical doctors. Flying the Peninsula flag in Ghana!
This is my colleague Elaine's patient from clinic yesterday who I diagnosed with Elephantiasis. It's caused by a parasite and is really rare in the UK, but the second case I've seen out here. The treatment here is just a single dose of Ivermectin. Later in the day the patient came back complaining that they lived very far they hadn't been given enough medicine, so Elaine gave them some paracetamol as well. Patients expect to be given lots of medicine on every visit, so even if they don't need anything you have to prescribe them some paracetamol or multivitamins or they'll barge back into the office to complain.
In England when patients demand prescriptions it's ok to say no, but here it's simpler just to given them vitamins - they probably need them anyway!
The language barrier is a big problem here. We work with translators who are usually nurses or nursing students and vary greatly in their medical + language ability and enthusiasm. I've been getting much vaguer histories than I would in England. It seems every patient I see has waist pain, chest pain, head pain and general body pain. I try to narrow down what's going on, but the translators don't seem to understand words to describe the pain like sharp/dull/burning. Almost all of the time when you ask how long they've been ill they'll say 3 days or 3 weeks. Time is a different concept here, much less rigid. There's a nice phrase I heard the other week: 'American's have watches, African's have time' (all the non-Ghanaian's here apart from me are American).
This is the boy whose photo I put up a couple of weeks ago who'd had a snake bite (scroll down). I watched Zato do his skin graft about a week ago and have been doing his dressing changes on alternate days. It's looking really good!
Hope you're all doing well! Sorry I've been rubbish at replying to people's messages - the internet is really temperamental, but I really really appreciate hearing from you all! I wrote a load of replies the other day offline and had them ready to send, then my laptop ran out of battery and I lost them all :( I will try to write soon though! xx
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