warning: do not touch the hot peppers

            To say this week was a quiet one would be an enormous understatement. Monday was our first day in the ER and it was the busiest day I think they’ve had in a long time. The majority of patients are rushed in due to severe malaria symptoms or hypoglycemia and the nurses quickly put in IV lines and get them on the proper medications. We also see a lot of sickle cell patients that come in with severe joint pains because of the “cold” weather. It’s really wild because they consider 90 degree weather cold and all walk around with wraps and jackets on while we’re sitting here dying and sweating. While in the ER we made a friend named Evans who is a prescribing nurse and at this hospital that pretty much makes you a doctor. Evans works in the out patient department, which works a little differently than doctor’s offices in America. Every morning hundreds and hundreds of patients sign into the hospital that feel sick but don’t necessarily think they have emergency-like symptoms. After getting their file they’re assigned a room and wait until the doctor (or in this case, Evans) makes it through the long line of people. Evans was so excited to meet us that he told us to come with him to his consulting room to help and observe. While observing he taught us how to check someone’s ears, how to palpitate the spleen, how to correctly listen to someone’s chest and how to fill out forms when they need a lab test.

            Some of our more interesting moments included: seeing a teenager who had two masses in her breast that need to be removed as soon as possible, looking into the eyes of elderly man with really bad cataracts, reading a patients cardiogram, and watching a counseling session of an alcoholic that needed help after a couple harmful nights out. However, our teaching reached a whole new level when a 25-year-old guy came in and needed a prostate exam. OPD is a very interesting and educational place to be since Evans presents each patient to us as a case study and then has us make educated guesses on what we think the diagnosis should be.

            Today we got a special opportunity to visit the public health department on their clinical infant vaccination day. The hospital is very strict on routine vaccinations when a child is 0-5 years old so they host a clinic every Wednesday for mothers to bring their children in to get the proper medicine.  Although we spent most of our time holding babies and talking about how cute they were, it was still a great experience and we learned how to give intradermal shots, which are much harder than intramuscular ones. One of our biggest mistakes of the day was agreeing to visit the morgue….. All I’m going to say about that is: take whatever picture you have in your head of a third-world country morgue and make it about ten times worse.

            On a different note, Skyler and I had some interesting home stay experiences this week as well. First of all, our family has used some money that they’ve saved up from hosting Americans and bought a washing machine. However, the washer isn’t hooked up to any type of water system so you have to pour the water in at the beginning, drain it after washing, fill it up to start rinsing and then drain it again after the rinse cycle. Our sister started it and gave Skyler the hose to hold while we waited for the “wash” cycle to be over. Little did we know that the machine doesn’t warn you when it’s time to drain so mid-conversation we had a shower of dirty water come shooting out of the hose into Skylers face, all over the front of me and coating the walls. We sat there laughing for five minutes instead of controlling the situation but the family couldn’t even be mad since they flooded the entire house the previous morning.

After cleaning up that mess we decided to cook a normal dinner for ourselves: eggs and hash browns. We thought it would be a good idea to add some onions and hot peppers to our potatoes….little did we know that would be a horrible decision. The hot peppers they have here aren’t even available in the U.S because they’re that hot, but our family failed to share that information with us. So after cutting the peppers and taking the seeds out I did the worst thing I possibly could… scratched the corner of my eye. The next 30 minutes were spent convincing myself I was blind, experiencing the worst pain I’ve ever felt, and pouring endless amounts of water into my eyes hoping that it would help. I finally got some blurred vision back and spent the next hour with a swollen and blood shot eye. The second wave of pain came to both Skyler and I when we realized that our fingers felt like they were on fire and that even putting a little bit of pressure on them hurt like nothing we’ve ever felt before. We then found out that when you handle these stupid peppers with bare hands the spicy part gets on your skin and causes a burning that they compare to “sticking your hands in hot oil” (again….. our family withheld that information until we were dying). Since there’s no vasaline in this house and soap and water did absolutely nothing, we decided to walk back to the hospital where we knew they would be able to do something to help us. After being made fun of we got some gauze soaked in vasaline wrapped around our fingers and walked back through town looking like the village idiots we are.

That’s all I have for now but we’re headed back to Cape Coast tomorrow evening for some training classes so if the internet works, I’ll add some more pictures!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGAIN EM! love you!