Uganda Love This

Deep down I knew I would experience “it” during my time here and I knew it would be hard. I realize that death is an unfortunate aspect of working in the medical field but that doesn’t make it any easier. Baby Awor was 2 days old when I watched him take his last breath this past Thursday. He was born pre-maturely at 33 weeks, with underdeveloped lungs and multiple other complications. The medical students, who were in charge of running the neonatal ward, brought him to Dr. Aliku as their last hope. Extremely bradycardic, Dr. Aliku was able to get his heart beating at a normal rate but this success was short lived. He passed away about 20 minutes later-an image that will be ingrained in my head forever. I’m not medically educated to say whether I think this child would have survived in a different setting. What I can say is that the lack of available oxygen, medication and personnel did not help his chances. What struck me even more was that medical students were in charge of running a ward completely by themselves and brought the baby to Dr. Aliku simply because they couldn’t get in touch with their superior. They were out of options and knew where to find him. Although some would say that medical students in the U.S have “their hands held” throughout their training, it is safe to say that the students here could use a little more of that.

 

On a less depressing note, Opio successfully arrived in Kampala on Thursday and was admitted to the Uganda Heart Institute on Friday! I will be heading down on Thursday night so that I can be present for his surgery on Friday. Although I am very nervous for this little guy, I am also extremely hopeful.

 

On Thursday night a big group of us headed to Bjz for Jess’s last quiz night. She will be flying out on Thursday so we decided that we have to do all of our favorite things before she leaves. We ended up having a huge group attend and were extremely confident that we were going to win. The questions were all logos that our team needed to identify. We ended up with a 29/30 but sadly that was not enough. We still had a really great time and met some great people whom we ended up hanging out with for a majority of the weekend.

 

On Friday, our group which consisted of a few of our Ugandan friends, our friend Katie and 3 guys from the US army ( I was not even aware that you could get deployed here) that we met on Thursday continued to check things of Jess’s bucket list by going to the Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. Surprisingly I still can’t get enough of the stuff and will most likely be going one last time before Jess’s departure.

 

On Saturday we all headed to the pool for a gorgeous day. I think every Mzungu in Gulu had the same idea since it ended up being a pool party of about 30 ex-pats from all over the globe. My new roommates were also there and I was able to finally solidify that I will be moving in during the first week of September. I am going to miss Jess so much but I am very excited about the group of people that I am moving in with (and the puppy that they just got last week.)

 

On Saturday night we all headed to BJz for one final hoorah even though it was pouring rain. We figured that since it was raining it would be fairly empty….wrong. It was more packed than I have ever seen it. I think this probably has something to do with the fact that the power was out for about 3 days and Bjz is one of the only places that constantly uses a generator. Nonetheless we all had a great time and just ended up dancing in the rain because it was too packed inside. I know I say this a lot but Saturday was by far my favorite night in Gulu up to this point. I guess it’s a good thing if I say this every weekend, right? Right.

On Sunday Jess and I lounged around like we do most Sundays and did not do too much else. We went over the events of our weekend and I’m pretty sure that I haven’t laughed that much in a very long time. I am so fortunate that I got to cross paths with such an amazing person and while I am very mad at her for leaving me, I am super excited that she will be in DC only an hour away from me when I’m home. 

 

As for this week, I spent Monday in the office with the nurses trying to organize a list of kids that have not returned for their follow up visits. It is our hope that we will be able to track these children down when school starts up again on September 7^th, but we definitely have a lot of work to do. Today was extremely busy and we even enrolled 9 patients into the registry, which brings us up to 97 patients! As I mentioned we had hoped to get to 100 by the end of August and I am confident that I will be able to report that we have surpassed this target come Friday.

 

Tomorrow a team from the UHI will be visiting our clinic in Gulu to search for potential surgical candidates. This does not happen too often so I am very excited that some of our patients will get this opportunity. We often refer our patients to the UHI so that they can have a “first look” appointment to be placed on a list, however most of them cannot afford the transport to Kampala. By having the team come to us, hopefully these patients will successfully be given a surgical slot and will only have to pay for transport once.

That’s all for now. Next update will be with Opio in Kampala!