Thursday 13th October
Overnight I had a message from Ann to say she had arrived in
Dubai weary but safe and sound. All being well Ann has arrived in Entebbe this
afternoon and will be travelling on to Mityana tomorrow after staying overnight
at Whitecrest in Lubowa which is a suburb of Kampala. Unfortunately our friend
Simonpeter will have left for a trip to Kidepo National Park in the north of Uganda
so she will miss him this time. She will be spending a week there and I intend
to join her on Wednesday next week when I can share transport to Mityana with
someone who is returning to the UK from Kagando. Needless to say I will be
extremely pleased to be reunited after spending the last 4 weeks on my own! Our
stay in Mityana will give us a good opportunity to see how both Ekiwulomo and
the Café are progressing and hopefully sort out any problems that have arisen
since the Esuubi trip in April.
In the meantime the hospital remains very busy but the new group
of interns have finally arrived. They are equivalent to FY1 doctors in the UK i.e.
they have just left medical school so are quite inexperienced. They are working
on Maternity and Paediatrics so I probably won’t see so much of them.
We continue to have some challenging cases on the medical
wards. Two men ended up sharing a side room over the last 3-4 days. They had
very similar stories having had a cough and fever over the last week. However
that was where the similarities ended as one man proved to have a
straightforward pneumonia while the other appears somehow to have developed a
large lung abscess and will take a considerable length of time to improve.
Pneumonia in the right lung middle lobe
James (who is one of the Ugandan Doctors working on the medical wards) and I
also have a” special project”- a man sharing his name and my age (!) so we both
feel we have a special interest! He is currently on our Intensive Care unit but
making good progress with his pneumonia!
Samuel one of the nurses. James the patient aged 62 and James the Doctor!
James the patient's chest xray
Kagando also never fails to turn up things which I
personally haven’t seen since I was working at Kapsowar. A young boy looks as
if he has Diphtheria which is now fortunately rare due to children being
immunised bit he seems to be making good progress after rather a stormy couple
of days.
Boy with probable diphtheria making a good recovery now
This morning I found a patient handcuffed to a bed. He had
taken an overdose and had tried to abscond from the hospital so as it is
illegal here to commit suicide the police decided to place him temporarily
under arrest. Hopefully we were able to sort things out today as he wasn’t intending
to kill himself and I think the police were satisfied he wasn’t just about to
break the law! Life certainly isn’t dull!
My room mate "George"
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