Things I've learned this week...

1. There is an entire country off the coast of Gabon.  It’s called São Tomé and Príncipe, and it’s the second-smalled country in Africa (after the Seychelles).  It’s an archipelago of 12 or so islands, the two largest being São Tomé and Príncipe.  According to my guidebook (the only one ever published on Gabon, as far as I can tell), the islands were formed from volcanoes, and were unsettled when the Portuguese came in 1470.  All the islands comprise 386 square miles and have about 165,000 people, and they speak Portuguese.  

2. There are a lot of Chinese people in Gabon.  According to an article from the nytimes, Gabon is running out of oil, and to compensate for its lost income it’s allowing Chinese logging companies into protected forest.  Not good.  But anyway, the hospital has anywhere from 3-6 Chinese men out of 26 beds, all with malaria, none speaking any French.  There’s a lot of charades going on on rounding. 

3. There are many things I like so far about Africa, but hand-washing, line-drying, and then ironing all my clothes (botflies get killed by the heat) isn’t one of them.  I think I’m going to take my chances and put most of my clothes in the hospital’s industrial-sized washers (with notoriously hot water).

AH! A bug just fell down my shirt.  Ok, zen with the bugs, zen with the bugs, zen with the bugs…  

Buggin' out

So I've been sitting here for about 45 minutes, trying to be ok with the ants.  Because it's Sunday, the research lab where we use the wireless is locked, which is how I find myself sitting on the back walkway using the computer, and trying to be ok with the ants.  They are everywhere.  They're not the little annoying ones that walk in organized lines by the billion (I can't even describe this, it's so amazing, I'll try to take a picture), they're the bigger black ones.  They keep trying to invade my space.  I keep shooing them away with (HAR) my shoe.  If they get too close I brush them off the balcony to the grass below.  I haven't killed one yet, though I think one or two haven't made it off the balcony injury-free.  There are too many to try to kill them all anyway, and I think killing animals on the grounds of the Schweitzer hospital is kind frowned upon by Schweitzer himself wherever he is.  You know, Reverence for Life and all that.  Then I decided to scoot up a bit and give them a little path behind me, so they could still hug the wall and get from one side of me to another (I was leaning against the wall), and I think we've worked out a mutually beneficial situation.  I don't have to spend half my time brushing ants away, and they can still go about getting breakfast, or going to ant church, or whatever it is they do on Sunday morning.  Letting them mill about so close to me is doing nothing for my near-constant feeling that bugs are crawling on me though.  Then I think I'm just paranoid or crazy, but then end up with zillions of bug bites all over (and in clothing-covered places).   I have even found spiders biting me.  Spiders.    I should just stop trying to fight the bugs.  There are way more of them anyway, and they can't kill me.  I'm going to try to be more zen about them, and just live and let live.  I'm probably scarier to them they they are to me, right?  I'll just keep putting hydrocortisone on giant itchy red spots and tuck my mosquito netting in real tight at night.  

Week 1: And so it begins

Thus begins our rotations here in Lambaréné.  I am doing adult medicine, and the other American medical student (also a white girl named Elizabeth, to maximize confusion) is doing pediatrics.  This week so far I’ve been in the inpatient wards in the morning (rounding on 26 patients in as many minutes) and the clinic in the late morning and afternoon (today: 2:30 to 4:30, hardly the schedule we're used to keeping at home, though it is oppressively hot, effectively limiting how many hours one can actually work during the day).  On my current to-do list: 1. Learn French, 2. Learn medicine, 3. Learn to understand Gabonese French, 4. Learn names of medicines in French (Esidrex?? Never heard of it.  Oh, wait, it’s hydrochlorothiazide?  Riiiight, I have heard of that).  The doctor I was working with actually left to go get something yesterday and said, “Ok, you can see this next patient while I’m gone,” and I was like, ummmmmm thanksbutnothanks.   It takes me 10 minutes just to read the notes from their previous visit, because they’re all in illegible French with abbreviations I can’t figure out.  Oy.  Adventure!  (Ça va aller...at least I hope.) :)  

I’m already a little bummed out (for lack of a more eloquent phrase) by the sick people.  Not that sick people in the US don’t bum me out, because they do, but I’ve already seen a few people this week who are sick.  Like, I look at them and wonder how it is they’re even still alive.  I saw literally the most cachectic girl I have ever seen in my life yesterday.  She was 22 and weighed maybe 65 pounds.  Good lord.  AIDS is a scary thing.  She'd been sick for a year but hadn't come to the hospital until now.  I just think of millions of dollars being spent in the US chasing incidentalomas (translation for non-medical people: incidentalomas are little shadows and blips that are discovered incidentally on CT's and MRI's done for other things, and usually turn out to be absolutely nothing) and it makes me crazy.  

Ok, off to bed.  Under my recently re-strung mosquito netting.  Now hopefully it won't fall on my face in the middle of the night, causing me to brush it off my face in a panic cause my half-asleep brain is concerned it's an ant colony, or a hungry mosquito family, or a bat.  Or a spider the size of a yorkshire terrier that we calmly (ahem) removed from my roommate's room the other day.  (Picture to follow)

La Petite Union Européenne

This is a very interesting place, for reasons I didn’t expect.  Dinner every night is a veritable melting pot of nations.  Some of the faces around the table: A couple from the Ukraine (internist and surgeon), a nurse from Switzerland (the German-speaking part), a man from Switzerland (the French-speaking part), a nurse from Spain (who retired from a career as a lawyer and then became a nurse), two Gabonese students, and a doctor from France (who is on sabbatical from a 20-year career as an internist in the French Antilles and drove here from France).  On the way back from dinner the other night in town, we were piled into the back of a big van, and we picked up a German student on the way, and suddenly everyone in the back (except the Americans) started speaking German.  (As Other Elizabeth said, “This conversation has taken a turn for the German.”)  And I kind of enjoy conversing with someone when neither of your first languages is the one you’re speaking in.  There’s no self-consciousness about grammar or pronunciation when the person you’re talking to probably won’t notice anyway.  

First attempt at a video...

Ok, ok...I know it doesn't play. This appears to be a youtube problem (a widespread one). I'll figure it out later. It's too hot to think right now.

Finally in Lambaréné

Well, the day has arrived. After, oh, 10 or so years of wanting to go to Africa, here I am! I am a little oppressed by the heat to fully enjoy the moment, but I am pretty excited. (Oh god, I just checked and weather.com says it's only 89 degrees outside. Could this possibly be true? I would have bet it was 95.) Luckily, there's no lack of modern conveniences here, including a small library with air conditioning and wireless internet. So...so far it's kind of like home, except for the bats in the walls. Anyway, it's pretty exciting to say you're on a new continent; that doesn't happen often in life.

So, this is not a place you'd pop over to for the week. To get here: a 6-hour flight from Boston to Paris (which landed at 12am Boston time, which was 6am Paris time, and I was very confused by the loss of the night. I mean, you can wake me up at 11pm and serve me coffee and orange juice for breakfast, but that doesn't make my body believe that it's really morning), then a 5-hour wait in the airport (with totally uncomfortable chairs not conducive to napping), then another 6-hour flight to Libreville, Gabon. Then waiting in lines in the airport, then a stay overnight in an airport hotel (it was 6pm by now), then a 4.5-hour drive from Libreville to Lambarene (see car below) the next day. Which included one exciting stop: the equator! We stopped at the sign (also see below) and I stepped across it, my first time entering the southern hemisphere. Yay! Then we finally arrived in Lambarene around 1pm. See photo of the welcoming committee below. Yesterday was a holiday, so there was a party going on, but we were too exhausted to go, we just unpacked and napped. And tried to figure out things like: how to hang mosquito netting, where the toilet seat went, how to prevent the bats from getting into the bathroom, why the towels are the size of hand towels, where to find dinner, etc. It was all very taxing on my jet-lagged and tired brain.

When I have more energy and my computer has more battery life, I will post more. I know you're all on the edge of your collective seat. :)

Stopping on the way to Lambarene

Really white girl on the equator

Part of the welcoming committee at the hospital

(A pelican, the hospital mascot)

(Why don't US hospitals have mascots? Discuss.)

I AM ACTUALLY ALIVE: Life updates, Musings, etc

So, I haven't lost the URL of this blog, nor forgotten it exists, I've just...I dunno...been lazy. There, I said it. No feeble excuses about being "busy," cause I've found time since the last post to watch 3 seasons of Alias and 30 rock. I have been doing real rotations for the last 4 months, like M-F 9-5 (or 8-6) ones, except this month, which is more hours and days per week than I care to count up. I wrote some posts in the last couple months but never actually edited them and posted them, so maybe I'll do that eventually. Now, though, many exciting things are happening! It is, of course, the vernal equinox, which would be easier to understand if it weren't 40 degrees out and 30 in my apartment. And yesterday was Match Day! NECN was at our school, and you can watch the clip here if you weren't lucky enough to be there. :) People have matched to all sorts of exciting places, and my classmates will soon be (gasp!) residents. And as if welcoming all the fourth-year-med-students-and-soon-to-be-interns back to the hospital today (we had yesterday off...it's kind of a national holiday in the world of medical education), my resident greeted me looking like this:
It's like she was saying, "Congratulations on the Match! Soon you will look like this. Make sure your scrub pants are tied real tight." (In case you're wondering, L-R: personal [hospital] pager, stroke pager [stroke intern off today], code pager, pre-pre call [i.e. back-up admission] pager, PDA.) Oy. I'm glad I'm putting of graduation and internship for another year. :)