June 19/20/21

I have been out of commission since Sunday afternoon with the African Gastro. This morning I was finally able to leave my cabin and go back to work. There is a saying on the ship that you haven't really been to Africa unless you have gotten sick... I had thought that I was going to sneak away without getting sick. I was wrong! I am still not feeling 100%, but on the Africa Mercy, if you can stand up you can work!

June 19
In the afternoon four of us took a taxi to Aberdeen beach to get some food and walk along the beach. It was busy with soccer games. There must have been 8 separate games being played along the beach all at the same time.

You can see all of the people standing way down the beach. they are all playing separate games of soccer

Another view of the games

The scenery in Sierra Leone is so beautiful with all of the

rolling mountains edging onto the sandy beaches

We stopped at the Craft Market on the beach (Aberdeen and Lumley beach are the same place). It was a really neat experience because the people working there asked us right away if we were from Mercy Ships (I wonder what gave us away haha). When we told them that we were, they brought a little girl up to us. When she was little her arm got burned and he had a contracture. She had been on the ship 3 weeks ago and had surgery to release the contracture. One of the nurses who had come with us that day had actually been the little girl's nurse on the ward. It was really nice to see patients back in their homes after having successful surgery. The people from the craft market also brought us another child who had finger and toe syndactly (for non medical people it is like webbed fingers or toes but all the way up to the top of the finger, so the fingers look like they are fused together).

Every time we go out, once people know we are from Mercy Ships, they bring us people who are in need of surgery. It really shows how great the need is here. Mercy Ships being here for 1 year is not even going to make a dent in the amount of surgeries needed. It is really hard to go out into the community as a medical professional and not be able to help people. We had to tell the family to listen to the radio for when the next screening is. After the craft market we were ready to head home (especially me as I was starting to feel sick). We took a taxi home and found out that the driver had also been helped by Mercy Ships. He had been to the dental clinic and had had some much needed dental work done!

One the way home we stopped at the cotton tree again for another photo op!

June 20

You don't want to know about this day... sick in bed... enough said!

I was glad to hear that I didn't miss anything in the OR though, as there was a problem with the oxygen concentrator and all surgeries were cancelled. We will try to do a few extra each day so that no one gets cancelled.

June 21

 Today I was feeling better so I went back to work. This week I am in Maxillo facial and we did 3 cases. First we removed a neurofribroma from a man's neck. For the non-medical people this was non-cancerous tumor (although rarely they can become cancerous). This man had neurofibromas all over his body. from what I have read, they tend to only grow to a certain size and they do not tend to spread. Surgery is the only way to remove them in Africa (although they can be removed with a laser back home). The reason we only removed the neurofibroma on his neck was because if it grew any larger, it could obstruct his breathing. Our second case we removed what we thought was going to be a neck cyst but ended up being a neck lipoma (a big hunk of fat). We ended the day with a young man who spoke english very well. He told me he was in university taking developmental studies. His upper lip hemangioma was quite large and was ostracized for it. We did a debulking of his lip.

As you can see from the pictures below... we had a bit of a leak in the OR today. The air conditioner condenser was leaking. We had to tape blue pads to the ceiling and hope for the best!

bowls on the floor

blue pads on the ceiling (there are 2 more behind me as well and a few more you can't see)