We had to go in this morning and follow up on some patients which turned into me rounding with my team because they are pretty much helpless. I am not too fond of my team, especially when Geren is not there. My interns, Cheboss and Obadiah, are so lazy and unmotivated. The need someone to push them to care about their patients. Why get into medicine if you dont care?! It is starting to drive me crazy. They dont know the patients, so rounds take longer than necessary because they dont know what is going on. I think I know some of the patients better than they do. Today on rounds, that I stayed for because I pity my team and want my patients to live, we did not have the registrar or the consultant. This means that the highest ranking person on the team was my intern Obadiah, great. He could not make a decision to save his life. I think I told him about 10 times that HE is the doctor. I am not here to diagnose, just to make sure my patients are getting the proper medications. I did have to have some words with a male nurse today. One of my patients has Kaposi's Sarcoma and needs chemotherapy to treat it. He has not been receiving treatment because oncology refuses to treat my patient when he has an unhealed bedsore. No one even know he had a bed sore until I went a personally talked with the patient and his caretaker. The nurse did not want to do anything about it, lazy. I had to get my intern to tell him whats up because in wards this dirty, an open bed sore can become infected and then septic in no time at all. I have a feeling I am going to have to follow up on this on a regular basis for my patient to get the car he needs. After rounds were over, I snuck out as fast as I could.
We had the kitchen staff, Julius and Penina, make a chocolate cake for Ryan (the pharmacy student here with us) because it is his birthday. It may be the best chocolate cake I have ever had. Not kidding. I plan on getting the recipe and trying to replicate it back in the states.
Back on Sunday night, Myra and I made chocolate chip cookies for everyone, using mom's recipe of course. They were a huge hit. It was quite challenging to get all of the ingredients though. We went to 3 grocery stores looking for chocolate chips/baking chocolate and no one knew what it was. I ended up chopping up some dark chocolate candy bars to use instead. The sugar here is not as small granules as we use in the states and it is brown. The brown sugar has a ton of molasses in it. The texture was a bit off, as well as the taste, but I am the only one that noticed. It was a lot of fun making cookies and sharing with everyone who missed them from the States.
On Monday, I tried what is called ORS (oral rehydration salts). Everyone here claims it is better than any medication to cure TD. I wish someone would have told me ahead of time that it tastes horrible. It basically tastes like you are drinking the ocean, pure salt water. Nasty! I ended up mixing it with a little bit of passion fruit juice, which still tasted horrible, and chasing it with a banana. I will say that it did help me to recover, but I had been taking Cipro for 2 days already. I cannot state with full confidence that it was the ORS that cured me. Remember, I love drugs!
Hope all is well at home, I am doing well here...
Btw, while taking this picture, I discovered all the fun things I can do to edit pics from my web cam.
For Example:
Gotta love it!
