Day 13: Catheter, Lidocaine, and Sutures

It's Saturday, but that didn't stop me from waking up at 6am and eating some beef jerky and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Three of us (Mimi, Joe, and myself) decided to go to the hospital today and tomorrow and take Monday and Tuesday off. That way, we could avoid the overcrowding from the other students in the program and finally get some more hands-on experience. So at 9:30am, we took a tuktuk to the hospital and headed straight for the Minor Theater.

When we arrived at about 10am, the only doctor present was putting sutures in a torn Achilles tendon. After he finished, we were told to take the patient to orthopedics for a cast (since that is the only ward with casts apparently), but they ended up sending us to Casualties to wait for a cast... but Casualties sent us back to the Minor Theater due to payment problems... so we spent the first hour or so dragging the poor patient around in circles.

We went back to Casualties to see if there were any interesting cases. There happened to be one. On the men's side of the ward, a man lay tied down on a mattress that had been removed from the bed and placed on the ground. The patient was partially sedated and had obvious injuries to the head. The nurse asked us to give the patient a particular glucose solution through his cannula (via IV). While Joe tried to do so, the patient managed to free his arm and ripped out his cannula. One of the doctors came and tried to put another cannula in, but the patient was too unruly. Eventually the nurses and doctor decided it would be best to skip that step and go ahead and put in a catheter and stitch his head injuries, so they sent the three of us to Minor Theater to do just that.

I got the duty of putting in the catheter, under guidance from Mimi (a 2nd year medical student from the UK). It took a while, and the patient smelled like he had never bathed in his life, but eventually we got it working. We then took turns cleaning head wounds with iodine, injecting lidocaine, and stitching. After an hour or two, we had finally addressed each head injury and were ready to take him back to Casualties. The nurses at Casualties asked us to put a cannula in, and Mimi tried, but the patient was difficult to work with so after a while a doctor came and did it for us. Finally, at 3:30pm, we were done and could call the tuktuk to take us back to the housing complex.

We were starving by the time we got back. Fortunately, when we had gone to the alligator farm a week ago, I took a picture of a billboard advertising for pizza delivery, so we ordered a pepperoni/mushroom pizza and a spicy chicken pizza. Not long after we ate the pizzas, Dollas's dinner was ready, so we ate again.

The picture I took of the food delivery billboard a week ago.

Risky backyard waste disposal?

Dinner that Dollas made (tortilla-like thing with beans/potatos/etc.).

We hung out for a little bit and then went to bed early. All the action at the hospital made us pretty tired.