KENYA - Day 1 at the hospital

I will keep it short as there isn't good internet tonight for some reason.  There's lots to tell.
It looks like it won't let me load any pictures.

Today was the first day working in the hospital.  We had 3 clinics; Plastics, GYN and ENT.  We sent 'troops' all over the hospital, but mostly to OB and Pediatrics to see what they want us to do.  The nurses were frustrated by their lack of resuscitation of newborns and the new hospital isn't up and running yet, so we'll work out of the old one.  We had a warm welcome from the CEO at the hospital and were surprised to find an physician from Washington University in Seattle who is living here for a year.  The have a program to help improve medical education here and she's involved.  I won't go into the details, but it's a very ambitious program which includes students and residents from the US and Nairobi who do rotations here so we'll be working with all of them.  As far as my clinic, the patients were preselected by the ENT who comes here from Nairobi 2 days a week.  It was tonsil, tonsil, tonsil, tonsil, horrible tumor, then tonsil, tonsil, tonsil, horrible tumor, tonsil, tonsil, tonsil, inoperable horrible tumor that looked like a large melanoma in the roof of the mouth.  Only one nasal septum, but almost every patient needed surgery.  Very interesting clinic.

There is a lady in the women's ward with a huge parotid tumor covered with a bandage who just came in today.  Maybe big as a grapefruit if you partially flattened it on the side of the head.  We'll do a bandage change tomorrow and get a better look at it.  The pediatric ward is 4 rooms side by side with large glass windows for walls with 8 metal, white paint peeling beds in each room.  Most of the kids have what appears to be a mother with them, but some are orphans.