Week 4 - In Surgery

For my fourth week in the hospital, I have been in the surgical department. The main surgeon is Dr. Shaneff, from Bulgaria. There is also an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Fernando. The doctors who run the surgical clinic are all Ghanaian.

We start the mornings with rounds in the female surgical department and then the male surgical department. Dr. Shaneff has been great and takes the time to explain each case. After rounds we sat in on the clinic with the Ghanaian doctors. They all seem really young but were great in involving us and asking us questions about each patient. Surprisingly, we saw a lot of males with inguinal hernias. One of the other volunteers told me that hernias are the tenth most common cause of admission to hospitals in Ghana. Other than that, common things seen in the surgical department include general abdominal pain, an absurdly enlarged scrotum, and impressively infected wounds. One teenage girl came in with a knee injury from playing basketball; it seemed really bizarre to see something that is so common at home.

All of the elective surgical cases were cancelled this week due to the complete lack of running water. Thursday and Friday are the scheduled OR days. So, after rounds, instead of going to the clinic, we went to the operating room. I got to see Dr. Fernando do a below-the-knee amputation on an older woman with gangrene. The amputation seemed really barbaric (it probably does at home too), but it was fascinating to see the doctor tidily stitch up the stump. We also saw Dr. Shaneff direct what we expected to be an appendectomy on a young man. We saw this patient yesterday, and again today, in rounds. Yesterday they thought it might be his liver but, after an ultrasound declared his liver and kidneys as normal, they predicted appendicitis. It turned out that it was pancreatitis. The doctor mentioned some specific type (necrotic hemorrhagic pancreatitis?) that has an 80% mortality rate. I really know nothing about pancreatitis. Mom and Pops, I’ll have to ask you, or look it up, when I get back home. On Friday we saw a C-section!! Not surprisingly, I was struck by the size of the baby. How is something that big really expected to come out of people? The last surgical case I saw (or half-saw) was Dr. Fernando removing parts of someone’s toes. For some reason this disturbed me much more than the sight of intestines or a uterus and I couldn’t watch.

That’s it for my fourth week in the hospital. I’m happy to have reached the weekend.