week Three

For week three I was in the emergency department, but I also jumped around a little bit. For the first day there were three of us shadowing in the ER and I really didn’t want to get in the way, so I sat in the corner and observed. It was interesting. I saw several IV insertions and a feeding tube insertion. We also got to attend a couple lectures with the medical students. I loved being able to sit and learn and take notes. I didn’t realize how much I missed being in a classroom. This week we were in surgery again. We watched the excision of a frontal dermoid cyst, an undescended testis, a bilateral hydrocele, and the excision of an extra finger and two extra toes. The final procedure was the most interesting, it was a colonoscopy of a four-year-old and then they gave her a temporary colostomy bag because they found that the tissue around her rectum was too infected and needed some time to heal. On Thursday I went to the sickle cell clinic and learned all about sickle cell anemia. We even got to go into the lab and see a blood smear of sickled cells vs normal cells. We met the most adorable little boy. He was around four and he was such a little punk! I distracted him for a while and got him to draw on the back of the prescription pad, but then he got bored. He was running around all over the place and not listening to his mother who laughed while she disciplined him. Finally, the medical student I was with decided to play a hand slapping game with him. But when he slapped her hands, she gripped his wrists and wouldn’t let him go. He started giggling and trying to break free. You could tell he was frustrated but he was having so much fun he couldn’t stop laughing. On the final day I bounced around from the ER to the neurodevelopment clinic, to the family planning clinic again because I just loved it so much the first time. This weekend was probably the most amazing out of all three of them. We drove all the way up to the Volta region to see Wli waterfalls. It took us six hours to drive there but it was so beyond worth it. The waterfalls were beautiful! They’re the highest falls in West Africa and the fourth highest in the world. We got there right before sunset, so we also got to see a swarm of bats chilling on the mountain side and flying around in the air. It was a magical experience.