August 7 Thursday- More power issues and operating all day

Well, there was still no power in the morning (they had to turn it off again to reconnect things) so we were able to sleep in until 9am! WOW!! I took my second cold shower of the trip- it still felt good to be clean even if the water temperature was a shade above arctic. One would think that because it is so dang hot in Africa (and we are here during the cold season) that the water from the taps would be warm, but NOOOO, that is a very ill conceived notion indeed!

We were able to begin operating again around 11:30am and we were once again treated to the afternoon rains around 2:30pm. We were also treated to a mouse in the recovery room! I did not see it (thank goodness) but I was assured by the other ladies that they were able to get it outside. I did have a run in with a spider in the OR though. I was designated the stomping person and attempted to squish it before it made its way towards the patient we were operating on. I missed it, but someone did chronicle the excitement on their camera. He looks tiny in this picture (upper right corner), but trust me, he was about the size of 2 silver dollars- yuck.

A funny story for today. Fizan was examining a patient who had an inguinal hernia and he asked the patient to cough (in an attempt to get the hernia to pop out). Well, the patient did EXACTLY what was asked of him- he coughed right into Fizan’s face!! After we all stopped snickering (except Fizan of course) he modified his request to “TURN and cough”- that did the trick.

Here's a picture of one of our little patients waiting to be operated on; they were all so cute- scared and compliant- and so very trusting of us.

Today we stopped at 11pm as the other cases were larger and we didn’t want to run too far into the next day. We proceeded to have a large dinner served to us around 11:30pm. Looks like my proposed "Ghana weight loss plan" is not going to work after all….