It’s been a tough week this week and certainly has had it’s
ups and downs.
Tom went to the UK for an interview and the same evening I
found out that I have been offered a Sexual Health/HIV training number in
London which I am pretty excited about! (and thank you to everyone who helped
with interview prep etc!)
The hospital has been busy as we have been 3 doctors down,
and it has felt like an uphill struggle at times! We’ve had a lot of very sick
patients, although a lot of interesting ones as well. My worst day was when a
young 17 year old girl who has been in and out of our ward for the last 3
months, (and as a result I’ve got to know her very well), died on Wednesday.
She was HIV positive with widespread growths everywhere which we treated
initially as TB, but eventually found out it was Kaposi’s sarcoma (a type of
cancer mainly seen in HIV positive people). Even in a resource replete setting
her disease would have been very difficult to treat (maybe some comfort) and I
have never seen such an extreme case, but it was really tragic, she was a
lovely intelligent girl, with perfect English who should have had her whole life
ahead of her. It just seemed like such a waste.
As well as sad cases we’ve had a week of weird and wonderful
diagnoses. I diagnosed Tabes Dorsalis (I think!), which is Neurosyphilis
affecting the neurological system and causing pain/deformity in the leg. I’m
not sure who was more surprised, me or the patient ! ( a woman in her fifties).
And Jamie who works on Augustine (male ward), has diagnosed the very rare
African Trypanosomiasis (causing sleeping sickness). We both got rather excited
when we could see it down the microscope. To those fellow Liverpool DTM+H
students, you’ll know what we mean! Sadly the treatment doesn’t seem to be
available in Zambia, so the search goes on..
In other non-hospital related news, we have several tomatoes
on our tomato plants, although they are still pretty green. After the very lush
wet season when everything was green, in the last few weeks it has dried out
almost completely and the landscape is starting to look totally different. We’ve
had a great bunch of medical students here for the last few weeks who are sadly
leaving this week and we had a leaving BBQ this evening with delicious food
including the local delicacy of pumpkin leaves mixed with tomatoes and ground
nuts (actually it is surprisingly nice when made properly!)
More cheery stories and photos to follow soon!...
