Day 10 - All In A Day's Work

Some of you may be interested in what we do all day long.  We usually get up around 6:30am, shower, grab a bite to eat and head down to the OR to check out the schedule.  After confirming the list for the day we head out to morning report held on the front steps of the hospital.  There the IC (before his departure) and now Dr Bob organize a brief worship then the department heads give report.

Then depending on how many operating rooms we have assigned to us (ranges from 1-3 depending on how busy other services are) some of us head to the OR, others  start making floor rounds, and others go to clinic.

Pictured below is a patient we rounded on who had bilateral Taylor Spatial Frames  applied for knee flexion flexion contractures secondary to arthrogryposis. 

Laura, Pete's wife, put in some long hours working with her team moving the organizing the new Pharmacy department.

If the transporters are not available to bring patients to the operating room, we have to take matters in our own hands...literally.

The case load in the OR ranges all the way from the simple such as dressing changes under anesthesia to the more sophisticated.  In the shot below, Corey excises a mass from the anterior aspect of the tibia while one of his colleagues keeps the flies away with the electric swatter.

Surprisingly, Pete and I performed the first SIGN nailing of a tibia this late on this trip.  Pete performed the case in exemplary fashion.

We have dealt with a lot of tumors this trip.  The patient below sadly had a large osteosarcoma around the knee necessitating an above the knee amuptation.

Whenever we can, we head up to the breakroom for a quick lunch or dinner.  The last few days it seems as though we've been late for both meals.  In the picture below, Pete was late for a prepared meal and is enjoying a snack from a prepackaged Humanitarian Daily Ration.  Stay tuned for a formal review of the contents of the packet from Pete to follow.

Unlike the young patient below who slept through his xray in the middle of the day, bedtime for us is somewhere around 11pm.  The nights are short and the days are rewarding, but long.