Day 11 - Last Day On The Job

Last full day in the hospital.  Hard to believe that our stay has come to an end.  Since there will be no orthopaedic surgeon in the hospital until this coming Sunday, we tried to "clean up" as many of the cases on the ward as possible.  This meant that several patients came to the operating room for washout, debridement, and dressing changes.  One of the two biggest cases was an open reduction and internal fixation of a humeral nonunion that Pete and I did.  the patient was of rather large girth and habitus and we ended up resecting 2-3cm of ivory bone.

The second was a removal of a broken femoral nail with reaming and re-rodding of the nonunion performed by Dave and Zach. 

Hopefully a German Plastic Surgery team will be showing up tomorrow to skin graft several of our patients including the little girl below so we had to make sure their labs were in good shape and the "pa mange/pa bwe" orders were written in their charts.

We also had the bittersweet task of saying goodbye to the many people who have worked so hard to make our stay so memorable.  Included in that group were the three gentlemen below, clinic translator ? (I forgot his name), Frantz ( xray tech), and clinic translator Max.  Rev Max (aka ProMax) was especially notable for his attempts to solicit seed money to finance his dream of opening his own pharmacy.

We also participated in our last clinic session and said goodbye to the many patients we had seen regularly for dressing and cast changes over the last couple of weeks.

We also had to bid farewell to many of the routines we had grown accustomed to such as morning and evening report, loudspeakers blaring the same canned hymns campus-wide early in the morning, and constant hand sanitization.

 A lot of memories, very few bad, mostly good are flooding my mind as I write this post.  I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the events of the past few days.  My optimism is guarded for the future of mission hospitals in general and this hospital in particular.  I think I'll let my final thoughts marinate over the weekend before I post them.  Time for bed, last night for sleeping with the mosquitos and the fan blowing wildly all night.  It's been a great trip and worth every inconvenience.  My mission mantra rings true once again...I get much more out of these ventures than I ever give.