My First Day at Work!

After waking up around 8 am and changing into my FIMRC scrubs, I cooked up a quick breakfast of an egg and a slice of bread. We then all loaded into Mubarak's car and headed out to the two local hospitals. I went to Pawsam hospital, which was founded by a German man and gives free medical care. The view from the hospital is incredible!

I spent the morning observing Dr. N (there is no way I can even attempt to spelling his name). He is a 70 something Indian doctor with a lot of wisdom. He started off the morning sharing some of his personal philosophy on life saying that each day your life starts over and you are only one day old. He told us to always look for new experiences to find happiness in life. He could have gone on for hours. but Arun then reminded him to get back to the patient and Dr. N remarked "Duty first!". We saw a variety of patients and sometimes it was hard to know what was going on because they were speaking mostly in Tamil (the regional language). We first saw a young boy who was bitten by a cat and had to get a tetanus shot. He was screaming bloody murder when he had to get the injection. I'm pretty sure everyone in the hospital could hear him! Some of the other cases we saw included anemia, is allergic rhinitis, rheumatic fever, skin infections and toothaches. I also got to watch two minor surgeries. The first was the removal of a lipoma on a girl's wrist. They used local anesthetic to numb the area and then made a small incision to remove the lipoma. The surgery seemed kind of unnecessary since the lipoma wasn't causing any ill effects but apparently it was removed for cosmetic reasons because a scar is viewed as better than an abnormal bump. This actually matters since India still operates under the dowry system, so if your daughter had a bump on her wrist you would have to pay a bigger dowry than if she had a scar which she could probably hide. Indian women take physical appearance and beauty very seriously because of the dowry system so they are always wearing gold jewelry, different bindis and flowers in their hair along with their beautiful saris. A nurse who works for FIMRC, Salina, actually brought flowers for me and the other girl volunteers to wear in our hair. The second surgery was the removal of a stye from under a woman's eyelid. Once again local anesthetic was used and injecting it into her eyelid looked really painful. The doctor then used an instrument to flip her eyelid and cut out the stye. In the morning we had a tea break and we also had a lunch break at 1 pm. At 5 pm we went out the street to be picked up by Mubarak, but time frames in Indian are viewed fairly loosely. "Indian time" usually means add at least a half hour. Accordingly Mubarak ended up picking us up around 5:30 and then we headed back to the volunteer house for the night. 

                     

                       This is a picture of one of the streets in town. 

That's all I have for now! Hope you enjoyed the updates!

Liz