I’ve found myself speaking a lot in public recently. Apparently the locals don’t mind this, as I seem to have a clear British accent which they mostly have no problem in understanding. Some of these occasions have been fairly straight-forward, such as leading the music & singing at our daily morning devotional meeting. As Kiwoko is a Christian Hospital, we have a daily meeting with some sung praise and worship, a short talk, and some prayers, which is a great way of starting the day.
On Friday afternoon, I was faced with a more involved talk – I discovered that I was on the rota to preach at the local church on Sunday morning. Nobody had bothered to tell me, and the fact that I’ve been going to one of the other local churches, rather than the one attached to the hospital, didn’t seem to matter. At least the service is in English rather than Luganda, and at least I wasn’t planning to be away this weekend, as I had to spend Saturday morning putting together a sermon!
Tomorrow is another talk – medical this time – at another of our Hospital Grand Rounds. This one is on Burns, so I’ve just finished putting together a short talk on “Ongoing management of Burn patients” dealing with things like dressings, skin grafting, surgery, complications, etc. I’ve managed to take a few pictures of various patients we’ve had here over the past weeks, and will hopefully keep it short and simple to cater for the various grades of staff who will attend to be educated. I think its mainly aimed at nurses and nursing students, although the whole hospital is invited.
We’ve actually had quite a number of patients with burns recently. There has been a bit of an epidemic of men getting set alight after being dowsed in petrol (a common form of punishment here!!!), young women getting boiling water thrown over them by neighbours, and children pulling hot food onto themselves or crawling into fires. Sometimes it takes a long time for patients to get here, and we’ve had a couple of kids die shortly after admission as they had lost too much fluid before we could get to treat them. Its tragic, and the majority of childrens burns are due to the cooking method’s in this part of Uganda – most food is cooked on a small charcoal stove sitting on the floor, which is usually fairly unstable and easily pulled/knocked over. The sad fact is that gas and electricity, which would both be safer, are financially out of reach of almost all of the people in this part of the world.
Its also difficult to treat burns here. A number of local remedies applied before attending hospital (including such superb treatments as rolling in ash and animal hair) make infections much more common. Dressings are expensive and we don’t have the number of nurses required to change dressings well regularly. For what we can do - which is usually resuscitation, exposure, keeping flies off, and skin grafting when needed - we actually do pretty well for most of our patients.
The next medical talks I’ll be doing is for our doctors and clinical officers – namely a series of tutorials on surgical topics for those who don’t specialise in surgery. I’ll be doing some stuff on Ano-rectal conditions (not particularly well managed here, yet!) and Trauma Management. I’ve also found a patient with varicose veins (not common here, but one of my specialist operations), and have both of our other surgeons and a number of theatre staff requesting to be present to watch what I do!
And then I’ve also been asked to preach a series of three talks at our morning meetings. We’re doing a series looking at some of the kings of Israel from the Old Testament, looking at what we can learn from their characters, their strengths and weaknesses. We’ve had King Saul and King David already. King Solomon is next week, and then I’ve got three talks on… King Manasseh. Hmm, very well known as the son of Hezekiah. There are 23 verses in the book of 2 Kings about him, rather than the chapters available on the other kings we’ve looked at. Oh well, I guess my evenings will be fairly full for the next couple of weeks as I sort all of these things out.
So as you can see, there’s a lot more to being a Surgeon in Uganda than just operating. You also have to be a Teacher and a Preacher among other things! Still you can’t do Brain Surgery every day…
Thanks for all the comments, and personal emails I’ve been receiving. Support and interest from overseas is incredibly welcome and appreciated. The hospital is also very grateful for some of the equipment that has recently been donated, with some to arrive later in the year. We now have a Sigmoidoscope, and will shortly be receiving a couple of flexible endoscopes. A hospital has also kindly donated their old image intensifier (theatre x-ray machine) which will improve our orthopaedic management considerably, and which should arrive before the end of the year. Thanks also for praying about our staffing situation. Our two local junior doctors have decided to remain with us for the time being rather than moving on elsewhere, which is a considerable blessing.
I hope life is as interesting and varied wherever you may be at the moment.
Steve
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