Full Day

We saw so much today in quite a short period of time. We sat in with the doctors that were doing admittance, so there were tons of incoming patients with various ailments. We saw a man that complained of having a hernia for twenty years, so my question is, why is he just now coming in?? I got to feel the hernia too, which was cool. A hernia is pretty much a tearing of the layer just below your stomach, which is meant to protect the organs below it. The hernia was located right below the middle of his chest, in a triangle shaped area, and you could very clearly feel the edges of the tear, which was interesting. The area that is torn is supposed to be kind of painful, and he winced as the doctor applied pressure to show us where to feel. We also saw a man with Kaposi sarcoma, which is characteristic of some HIV and most commonly AIDS patients. This is a skin disease, where skin lesions appear on the body, and leave dark marks and scars where they were formed. This is a really bad sign, and usually only appears on progressed cases of the disease. He had it on his upper thigh. I have seen pictures of this in books from my HIV/AIDS research, but never personally, so this was interesting for me. We also saw a little boy that needed a circumcision. He was on ARV’s (Anti-retroviral’s for HIV patients) and this supposedly created a sore at the tip of his penis, so the doctor decided the foreskin needed to be removed. Next, we saw an 86 year old lady with esophageal cancer. She was very sickly, and at that age, there is not much you can do. He was going to get her admitted and try chemotherapy, but she is too progressed in the disease for it to have much of an effect, and she is too old to do surgery on. A younger boy came in with intense pain in his abdomen, so debilitating that he could barely walk. The doctor was guessing that it was either appendicitis or TB, but was learning towards appendicitis because of his appearance. They were going to do an x-ray and once it was confirmed, get him into theatre to remove the organ. Funnily enough, another young girl came in with similar issues, but this time the doctor thought that they appendix had actually already burst. She was going to get taken to surgery immediately, which in South Africa+ hospital time = hours away. The next patient, a woman came in wanting to get a keyloid removed. It was huge; the size of an orange on her ear lobe. I was curious why she hadn’t come in earlier as well—something of that size doesn’t grow over night. But, anyhow, she was in now. I didn’t hear what was going to be done in that regard. An older man came in saying that he had an inability to swallow for two years! I really don’t understand why these patients don’t come in right away. When you wait longer, whatever is wrong more than likely just gets worse and harder to fix. He was quite humorous. He told the doctor “I can’t swallow anything, but alcohol goes down just fine”. The next patient came in with chromo mycosis of the lower leg. It was hideous! This is pretty much growth and swelling, along with sores and bacteria. It was quite nasty looking, but she seemed rather unbothered by it; she was wearing a skirt and letting her whole infected leg be exposed. The next patient was an older lady with a breast cancer growth. Her uncancerous breast looked like a deflating bag, but her cancerous breast was completely different. It had a huge hard growth in it that made it stay higher up in place, and was pretty deformed with the nipple area was bleeding. I got to examine the cancerous growth, and it was rock hard. It was the strangest thing. This next patient is an interesting case. She wasn’t too old, maybe in her mid twenties, and was a firefighter (you don’t find many women with those kind of jobs here, and it shocked every one of the doctors and nurses). She was on the way to work for a night shift, and was attacked. The criminal stabbed her through the left side of her stomach, all the way through her organs diagonally down to her right hip. It had only been a month since this happened, and when she came in, she was apparently on her death bed doing horribly. But, she was in today looking very healthy and well, simply getting a check up to make sure everything was healing well. It was incredible. The last patient was pretty gross, but pretty common. She was diabetic and had some sepsis in her feet which had caused all of her toes to be amputated. Her foot was healing, and she was also just in for a check up to make sure the healing was going well. She pointed out that it was bleeding through the bandages a little bit, but I didn’t go into the examination room to take a closer look; that’s really not my favorite. She was our last patient of the day, and it was our last day at King Edwards.

We picked up our rental car right after work and decided to do something fun tonight since we had been doing so much work. We had been meaning to go to Florida Road, a fairly famous street with safe night life. It had been recommended to us by past interns, the program coordinator, and our host families. We got all dressed up for almost the first time since we have been here, and went out. It felt so good to get pretty again and go out to do things that felt familiar! I’ve missed it a lot! Florida road is packed with cool restaurants, clubs and cafes, as well as some shops mixed it. It was really fun. We found this amazing restaurant/bar called the Cabana to go to; it had a little bit of a Spanish flare, which Miles and I both liked. It was a really cool inside; they did a great job with the decorating and creating a warm atmosphere. We had amazingly yummy food and were very happy with our choice to come here. There was a huge table near ours with a big group of people occupying it. Two of the men at this table were incredibly drunk and we found them to be quite hilarious. The one guy kept shouting things really loud, and he was just so stupid. Even his drunk girlfriend found him to be embarrassing, so you know it had to be bad. The other guy was even worse. He thought he was the coolest thing ever, and was dancing THEE WHOLE time. He was horrible! And he was drunk, so everything was over exaggerated. My mom would have loved this guy; she would have peed her pants if she saw him going at it. After this, we had to go pick up Miles’ host brother Boom Boom from his school dance at a huge building downtown called the ICC. We decided to go back to the News Café at the Casino Entertainment building for a while since it was still sort of early and we were enjoying being out. We had some desert, the best chocolate cake ever, and some yummy drinks. We had finalized plans to go to Margate in the morning, so we headed home after this to get packed and ready to head out.