Dr. Khan's

We are back to work. This week however, instead of working in hospitals or clinics, our medical director Dr. Khan is letting us come to one of his offices to look through patient files to collect data for our theses. This is very helpful, and I’m glad we are getting time set away to do this. But, because we were just looking through files, it was quiet an uneventful day. One thing interesting happened though. Dr. Khan was seeing patients this whole time, while intermittently coming to check on our progress, teach us a few things, and answer our questions. He was about to perform an adult circumcision, and asked if we wanted to scrub in and participate. Since things were pretty dull, and we had never seen one, we figured why not and got ready. We both opted to watch rather than assist this time. It was quite interesting, but I think it would be a smarter idea for a man to get this done when he is first born. Traditional men in South Africa always get circumcised at birth, but in the last few years, this has changed, and has left millions of grown men uncircumcised and more prone to infection and contracting HIV/AIDS. This is clearly a huge issue since HIV is so prevalent in the country, and the government has initiated a plan to have these millions of men circumcised to reduce their chances of contraction from 100 to 10%. Because of this initiation plan, clinics have been swamped with men wanted them done. Dr. Khan is a really good doctor, and made the procedure virtually painless for the patient. He wasn’t asleep however, which I would have personally wanted if it was me. But, this is Africa and that’s not how they do things here. He got a local anesthetic shot into the area around his penis with a needle, which was pretty painful for the patient, but it became numb very quickly, and then it was all fine. The procedure itself didn’t take very long, and then he stitched the skin back together and sent the man on his way. We also got to see an HIV infected man with TB of the auxiliary lymph nodes, which are in your arm pits. I didn’t realize that you could get TB in certain areas. I thought if you had TB, you had the characteristic cough and spray etc, but I was wrong. You can have TB in one area, such as certain lymph nodes, that give you no cough or anything like that. Dr. Khan needed to take a biopsy to see if there was pus in this lymph node. If there was, he needed to cut it open, drain it, and stuff the ear with gauze. But luckily, there was no pus and no incision. He sent the biopsy to the lab for testing, and we finished up some paperwork before leaving for the day.