Doctors without...

Doctors without Borders???… Doctors without Electricity

Huh, What?  No, that’s not us anymore.  We have three working generators.  Er, um, two working generators, Er, um, one working generator…

What?  We have no working generators?!!!  

This is NOT good.  

I could go into a whole other discussion as to how we should feel guilty since we are kind of the ones in charge here, but we’ll save that for another blog.  Simply stated, it is someone’s full-time job to make sure the generators are working, and they aren’t.  

Back to Doctors without electricity.  We are doctors, not mechanics.  But I should have paid attention more when my dad was working on cars at the farm in Oklahoma.  I failed in that area.  I’m pretty sure I could look it up on YouTube or something, but… I can’t charge my phone because you know what?  I have NO electricity!  

Back again to the doctoring side of things.  

Where to start?  There’s been nine days of spotty electricity, and now several days of zero electricity.  

It’s a terrible, terrible situation.  But it doesn’t really seem like a big deal anymore to me. 

I’ve become less demanding (Others might not agree with that, but it’s true).  For example, I used to use a knife handle with my scalpel. Several times they forgot to put the handle in, so I started using the scalpel by itself.  I figured it’s faster to just take scalpel and cut!  

I rarely use cautery, except for mastectomies or masses that bleed.  I don’t use suction for c-sections, but I do for big, dirty laparotomies.  

If you’ve lived in rural Africa long enough in the medical field, you get used to improvising.  You can get mad and angry, or simply do your best.  It’s possible that all three could occur.  

Recently, I’ve been doing many cases in the back closet.  I originally said I would only do simple cases like hernias and hydroceles back there, because the lighting is not ideal and the table doesn’t move.  The table, er, um, stretcher, is also pretty wide, so it’s hard to get to the middle of the patient.  

Last month I started doing more advanced cases, as we had two ER physicians visiting who provided excellent anesthesia care.  Andrew operating in the big OR, and me operating in the closet.  Several times I said, absolutely no way was I going to do that case in the back, “Salle B.”  But then, due to time constraints and a multitude of patients, I ended up doing several emergency laparotomies in “Salle B,” the storage room.  We even moved a suction machine back there.  So I had an intubated patient and suction machine with my awesome headlamp that Dr. Dan left us.  We still couldn’t move the bed, but it was better than operating at midnight.  

Maybe God is evolving us to show we can do difficult cases with minimal things.  Or maybe we failed, letting all three generators break, even though it wasn’t exactly our fault.  It’s always our fault in the end.  And that gets tiring.  

So when Sarah and I did a third repeat cesarean in pitch black the other night, for twins no less… it wasn’t a big deal.  A little scary for her, since she had been gone four months, and it was her first surgery after being back.  But, she did a superb job!  

And when Andrew and I did an emergent laparotomy for gastric perforation last night, it wasn’t a huge deal.  It was not ideal, and we worried our headlamps might give out, and then what?… But God is sustaining us.  

Hopefully the generators are fixed soon.  And we have more responsible people take over soon.