People usually ask me at home 'what the normal stuff that you see out there at the hospital?' to which I usually reply things like malaria, or HIV, or pneumonia, or diarrhea. But in actuality the cases that consume a lot of your time and brainpower are the weird, where you're struck with something you've never had to deal with before and are not even exactly sure where to begin. Those type of cases are the usual for us, each week having to puzzle through how to take care of a huge urinary mass, or whether you should remove the breasts on a hermaphrodite, or when to do the surgery for a 4 month abdominal gestation. Those are the things that tropical medicine diplomas can't prepare you for: you rather rely on your ability to be resourceful, puzzle through things on your own, call on remote expert guidance from doctors overseas, and tackle things without knowing all the outcomes beforehand. Obviously that kind of working without a net doesn't always work out well, but surprisingly it does quite a bit of the time, too.
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