vicissitudes of medical work

Thought I'd give you a brief picture of what medical life is like here.
Overall, it's been pretty much what I expected. The doctor's day is
less packed, and it seems much less busy as things which seem like they
should be less difficult (suturing a wound, putting in a suprapubic
catheter, casting a fracture) end up taking quite a bit of time, so that
you don't feel that you're getting that much done. We are hamstrung by
supply shortages, despite a recent container sent to us by Samaritan's
Purse. One of the frustrating things about relying upon donated
supplies is that there's no supply and demand ordering, so that you end
up with excesses of certain supplies and deficits of others. So we have
boxes with open heart supplies, laparoscopy equipment, expired lunch
meat (no kidding!), and laminectomy sets, all of which are essentially
useless to us due to manpower, expertise, or equipment lack, while on
the other hand what we need are things like gloves, tape, ECG
electrodes, IV fluids, and medications like potassium, all of which are
much less expensive than what we got, but infinitely more useful to us.

I got a promotion when I got here -- I'm the head of radiology, and also
the direction of continuing medical eduation. Since I'm the only one
with any significant ultrasound experience, I spend some part of my day
doing scans. We have a curvilinear probe and a vaginal probe for a
Sonosite Titan machine, which is good, since I'm fairly familiar with
it. I'm definitely stretched past what I was trained on -- my training
for recognizing ectopics is only somewhat transferrable to diagnosing
pelvic masses, but you do you best. Unfortunately, my only reference
text out here is a OB/GYN ultrasound book from 1985, when they had
barely invented the technology, so it is of limited use. You do the
best you can and try to keep improving with practice.

As for my patients, I'll save that for the next installment.

I'll do my best to keep the blog updated (I'm sending these posts sight
unseen, hopefully you're still reading them) but between phone service
being down several times a week, power outages, dial-up internet with
speeds around 7-20 kbps, and limited access to a phone line in the first
place it may be a bit sporadic at first. Thankfully, we are getting
wireless satellite email setup sometime in the next month or two, God
willing and funds available, so at that point I should be a bit more
reliable. In the meantime, don't give up on me.