Bandiagara Day 7 (22/07/09)

When we got into the clinic this morning Badry was writing an email to Shelia (she’s from the Baltimore lab and is in charge of ordering and shipping supplies to the clinic here) to reorder some things for the lab. He asked if we could look the email over to perfect the English; he had done a fairly good job and only a few sentences needed tweaking. While helping him with the email we missed going on rounds, c’est la vie. After Dembele returned from rounds we joined him in the clinic. Today we had a few different cases on top of the usually colds, fevers and stomach upsets. We had a young teenage girl with a yeast infection, as well as a UTI. Apparently she doesn’t like to take pills, so she was given an injection of antibiotics for the UTI and told to come back the next two days for follow up doses. The next patient was an older woman with trichamonisis (I only knew what this was because a patient at UMMC had asked me before . . . in case you want to know it’s a vaginal parasite). She was given a prescription of a treatment for both her and her husband (like most STDs you need to treat both partners or they’ll just keep passing back and forth). After the flow of patients slowed down Liz and I started talking to Dembele about music, he seems very fond of eighties power ballads and to be honest bad American love songs. I had to apologize that I wasn’t familiar with many Malian musicians, but hopefully when I come home I can find some on iTunes (you can buy CDs here, but they’re usually bootlegged and of dubious quality).
After lunch we went to the post office with Tolo and Djigaba (I had written some postcards and still had the ones Mark Travasose had given me before he left). When we got to the post office the front shutters were closed (though it was still early in the afternoon); we went around with back and found the manager of the post office. He offered to open it up for us, though I think mostly because we were white (I guess there’s some benefit to looking so out of place here). Oh my goodness we had a baffling time at the post office. I wanted to buy stamps but also some more postcards, Liz also wanted a few stamps and a few postcards. Apparently the cash had already been sent to the bank or wherever for the day, so there was no change. I needed 22 stamps (or stamps for 22 postcards (6 I had written, 7 of Mark’s and 9 for new postcards). However, I didn’t have many small bills. First we tried putting Liz and my purchases together to see if that would work out better, we tried different combinations of stamps and postcards, but nothing seemed to come out to an amount that we could make with the bills we had. In the end Liz paid for hers separately and was able to somehow come up with the correct change. I on the other hand gave him my money and he wrote down the change I was owed so I could come back tomorrow. In the end I walked away with 9 new postcards (plus the 13 I had), and 3 pages of stamps (apparently it takes 3 stamps and 10 days to mail a postcard to the US). I decided to go back to the office and work on licking stamps (whoever invented self adhesive stamps was a genius). When putting on the stamps I learned that they take up a lot of space (so if you are getting one of my early postcards, sorry if the stamp is covering up half of sentences, I guess you can pull them off to read it).
After we got back to the office and I finished licking stamps (thank goodness Liz helped), I went back to the clinic to check in on some new patients that had come in and Liz went to the lab. The first patient was a woman with severe hypotension (80/60) and vertigo. She needed an IV to boost her blood volume and try to raise her pressure, so we walked her over to the hospital (I was really nervous while we were heading over there that she might just fall over, so I stayed next to her, which turned out to be a good plan because halfway there she grabbed on to me to stabilize herself). After getting her settled, the nurses started an IV and Dembele and I headed back to the clinic. After we got back there was a woman with her baby, who had been vomiting and unable to keep food down. This unlucky baby got to be the recipient of my first injection (other than frogs and fish in college mind you); I gave him and anti-emetic intramuscular injection, but he didn’t seem to appreciate it. The next patient was a rather interesting character, he claimed to be a friend of Badry and Dr Kone but he seemed like a bit of a space case. He was complaining of trouble hearing and some headaches; apparently Dembele thought he was a bit odd and began asking him if he was drinking a lot of alcohol or doing and illicit drugs (the answer was no, apparently the guys just a little off in the head). Although Dembele wasn’t convinced there was anything really wrong with this guy he decided that a prescription for vitamins couldn’t hurt (especially since pretty much everyone here has some sort of vitamin deficiency), and so I got to write my first prescription was well (though they don’t write them like we do at home). He is apparently an artist and after having finished his visit with the doctor he was insistent about wanting to show me his wears (I wasn’t particularly interested, but I’m not good at telling people no, so I told him I was going to go get my friend from the lab so she could look too). I found Liz in the lab with Tolo looking at slides. I asked her if she wanted to see the guys jewelry, but we both decided we weren’t interested, but instead of telling him I just hid out in the lab till he left (I know it wasn’t very nice, but oh well).
Tonight we had dinner with our friend Fredrick (who we met in Bamako and was in town to visit the Dogon country with his family) at the Cheval Blanc Restaurant (which is part of that giant hotel we had walked to before). Tolo and Dembele came to and was met Fredrick’s sister, her boyfriend and her daughter (who is studying to be an English teacher in Belgium). Dinner was nice, though the mosquitoes were a bit intense (good thing we were wearing repellent) and occasionally the power flickered out. As we talked the language fluctuated form Dogon to French to English and back. After finishing we said goodnight and goodbye to Fredrick (he will be leaving Bamako the day we’re driving back).