Waayy Too Many Bugs

As we passed this bakery factory on the way home from rotations today, it reminded me of something that happened last week. On Friday when we picked up our rental , Uncle Roy, our driver was giving Miles directions home, and one of them was “when you smell bread, turn right”. Later on when we were driving passed the bakery and Miles remembered, he told me and we couldn’t believe Uncle Roy thought those were legitimate directions; how funny!

Today was kind of an interesting day. It was our first day of surgery clinic. We didn’t know exactly where to go, so we headed to see the head of public relations for the hospital to direct us (she directed us to pediatrics and introduced us to the head doctor in that clinic on our first day last week). We also wanted her to introduce us to the head doctor so that we could find our way around better and get a good experience out of it. When we arrived, she was in a meeting that wasn’t going to end for another four hours! We decided to branch out on our own and go ahead to the surgery clinic. We found the main patient rooms; three mass rooms with four doctors in one, two doctors in the second, and one doctor in the third, with three check-up rooms in between the three rooms. We met the head doctor, and found another out of the group to shadow. He was extremely intelligent; I could tell as soon as he started speaking to us. We walked in at an awkward time, however. He was in the examination room with a male patient, just starting to check him out. So we quickly put on some gloves to get started with him. The patient had a smallish hard mass that you could feel in his stomach, and the doctor had already found him to have an enlarged sigmoid in a previous exam. The symptoms were still persisting however, so the patient was back. After we felt his stomach, the doctor had this patient lie on his side with his pants all the way down, and quickly shoved his hand up the man’s butt to check for ulcers. Yikes. Way to start off our morning (: The next patient that came in had a benign melanoma lump in her breast that was really bothering her and causing some pain. She opted to have it removed, and made an appointment for surgery in two months. Did you know that the hospital is closing their day surgery clinic for six weeks for the world cup?? So this girl has to wait until after that closing period to have her surgery—unbelievable. Mini was also telling me that school is closing for a month for the world cup; imagine something that like happening in the United States! Anyways, we saw a few more patients with this doctor. The last patient was in with an abscess, but a misdiagnosed one. She had tons of tiny abscesses on her butt (of course), and in South Africa, instead of taking a skin cell tissue sample, they make a fairly large rectangle incision where the ulcers are, deep enough that uninfected flesh is surfaced. It’s pretty brutal. After they did this, they discovered that the ulcers were just below the surface of her skin, and could be treated without drastic measures. They were all gone and healed now, but she is left with this huge hole in her butt from the incision, probably about the length of my palm and half the width, maybe an inch deep; it’s not a little thing, it’s seriously huge. The doctor was just checking to make sure the skin was healing well and that no new abscesses were forming.

Clinic was now over for these doctors, and they headed down to theatre for minor surgeries today. The only problem was that all of the doctors started leaving the room one by one, while the nurses and some patients were still in the patient rooms, including us. We didn’t realize that all of the doctors were leaving until I thought about it, and looked out the door to see them all walking off together. We grabbed our stuff to go and find them, with no luck. We got lost first, and then eventually found a wandering nurse to ask where the specific theatre was. It ended up being in the basement accessed down some odd hallway, and the doctors from clinic must have already scrubbed in for surgeries, because when we arrived, we just saw a bunch of nurses and other doctors scrubbing up to go. We didn’t know any of them, and instead of venturing into possibly horrendous procedures, we decided to take our lunch, since it was noon already anyhow.

We have found this cute café called Circus that is located in the mall about five minutes walking distance from King Edwards that is run by an older Dutch couple. They are the sweetest people, and since there aren’t many eating options (very different than in the United States), we decided to go back; that was probably our fourth time since being at King Edwards. When we were there, Roy called to pick us up an hour early for no apparent reason, so we never ended up going back. Hopefully tomorrow we can meet a surgeon and get in there.

I walked into the bathroom tonight to run myself a bath and all of the sudden the biggest cockroach I have ever seen just comes sauntering into the room! So I run and get Mini, who doesn’t want to touch it either, so it just keeps crawling around in there. We go to get Mzamo, who is sleeping, so mini grabs the broom from the kitchen like that’s going to do something, and then the cockroach isn’t in the bathroom anymore. It’s just gone! I never took my bath because my luck it would come crawling out of the drain in my tub. I’m pretty much traumatized; I really can’t handle bugs. And now when I have to pee in the middle of the night it’s not going to happen…my stomach is just going to have to hurt until the morning when I can see! That’s the most horrible thing ever ): Later on in the evening when I was going to the bathroom to brush my teeth for bed, guess what was waiting to greet me outside of my bedroom door? Yep, of course the mammoth cockroach. I went to wake up Mzamo and he chased the cockroach (I don’t understand why they don’t kill it) until it went under the front door outside. That didn't make me feel any better because that means it can just come right back if it can crawl under the front door. So I proceeded to the bathroom only to find two of its babies greeting me at that door. Auh! One of them, the largest, disappeared (the worst ever) but the other one was really tiny and I was able to kill it. I’m all paranoid now and feeling itchy and gross, and went to the kitchen to spit out my mouth wash, gargled and looked up at the ceiling and found a huge lizard looking down at me. It surprised me, on top of my already shaken state, and I probably jumped three feet out of my skin. I quickly turned to the sink to spit out my mouth wash so I could go back to my room and found huge African ants crawling all over the counter by the sink!!! I feel sick. And then to top it ALL off, I went to go pee before going to sleep and found the dad cockroach just sitting on the toilet! ): I woke Mzamo up to kill it, and he finally did this time. I slept with the light on because I was so paranoid. I already know that all of you are going to laugh at my fear and attached story, that one never fails (ahem …Chyna…), but I seriously want to leave this house. I can’t handle this.