Orthopedics

We were finally able to work in orthopedics today. I worked with a lady doctor named Dr. Pohl, and that was nice. Miles and Lauren paired up with a different doctor, who I sat in with for a while. He was great as well. We all just saw patients and their x-rays and decided what to do with each case. Sometimes it was a cast for the first time, sometimes it was re-casting, surgery, or just finishing up their ‘treatment’ and getting their casts removed. Clinic only lasted the first part of the morning, and then the doctors pretty much left. The only people left were they practitioners in the pop (plaster of paris) room. It looked really interesting, so I was excited to get to work here. The regular plasterer was on leave, so the retired plasterer, Mr. Smith was contracted to work in his stead. He was the cutest old man I’ve met in a long time, and I’m so glad I got the pleasure of working with him. He was also so amazing at his work. I can understand why they missed him when he retired. We helped him do casting/remove casts for some of our time there, and then he let us do a cast on our own. Lauren did most of it, but I helped some. There were four patients waiting for sutures to come out, and I’ve done this before, so I did some of them and then taught Lauren how to do them as well. That part of pop was great, but then something not so pleasant happened.

A man came in with a temporary cast needing his bandages changed, and he had never shown up for his previous appointment to do so I guess, so he was far overdue. He had surgery on his ankle/leg, and as he was unwrapping his bandages, the most horrible smell filled the room. Every patient that was near cleared the area, as well as the other practitioner. It was horrible. I tried to stand as far away as I could as well, and even resorted to using my mask for part of the time. When the bandages were finally removed, I was in shock. Both sides of his ankles that had been operated on had gaping wound holes where the skin had failed to rejoin and heal. They were bloody with pus and were pretty much infected and rotting. It looked terrible and smelled the same way. One of the practitioners put a bowl on the floor and filled it with pretty much surgical body sanitizer and alcohol and made him put his foot in it. I winced at the thought; I can’t imagine how much that would hurt. As he lowered his foot into the solution, he was crying and shaking in pain. The practitioner took a cup and poured the solution all into the wounds to clear them out as best as he could. Once this was finished, he had the guy sit on the table so that he could further sanitize it. I guess the patient had stitches that were also supposed to be removed, but the holes in his ankles were so gaping that he left them in. He took sanitizer and poured it into the gaping wounds, and then packed them and put a new temporary cast on. It was terrible. But I guess it made for a busy and interesting day.

We had our weekly meeting today with Avril and Marion and it went really well. We ended up just chatting and laughing for the majority of the time, which was fun. I really like them, and am so happy about the improvement from Durban and Cape Town in terms of directors. We were with them for about three hours, and then decided to go to Cubana. We found out that they have one in Cape Town too! This is the place Miles and I visited a few times in Durban. We wanted to take Lauren, so we went straight downtown, kind of got lost, but eventually found it. Our food was so yummy and we had a really nice time. Miles is kind of sick, so we went home after this so that he could rest and hopefully feel better for the rest of our busy weekend.