Busy week, Workshop, Birthday, Harare surgery team here and Tyler leaves!

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This past week was busy here as we tried to finish off our month end reports and see our patients.  It was a busy week with many patients and Tyler, our medical student helped with 4 C/Sections in less than 16 hours!  He was happy!

On Thursday and Friday a Health team came to conduct a workshop here to teach us how we are going to be reimbursed for the amount of work we do in the future.  Since we see a lot of patients we do hope to benefit from this program and we hope it brings us funding for the hospital that we have not had for 2 years and 7 months. 

As we were involved with this training we all had to go in and out to see our patients and keep the hospital moving at the same time, so we were going early and coming home late to get both done.
We celebrated Dr. Isala, our Medical Superintendent’s, birthday with a cake during lunch at the meeting.  Everyone got a bite of cake to celebrate.  He has been with us 4 years this week too.
On Friday night I hosted a dinner for the team that came and my visitors—so there were 13 of us for dinner. 

Friday night to Saturday morning kept me going to my door all night.  At 2 am the driver came to take 2 of the team members to Karoi and pick up our surgeon and Anesthesiologist from Harare who left Harare at 2 a.m. to meet him in Karoi at 4 a.m. so they could come on for a day of surgery here.

Then at 3:30 a.m. another driver came to get a car to transfer a patient to Karoi who had been bitten by a hemotoxic snake and was bleeding internally and had a platelet of 35!
By 5 a.m. the team who presented the conferences left so I got up to see them off and just decided to stay up and get coffee and muffins ready for the surgery team before they started a long day of surgery!

By 6:15 a.m. the surgery team was here and ready to go but they had to wait 30 minutes as our team did a C/Section—the second one that night!  Then they started their work!

They had 12 people on their list and 3 hysterectomies.  They worked hard and Tyler got to assist and hold instruments and put some stitches in so he was very happy.  They all broke for breakfast at 1 p.m. and then came to my house when finished at 5 p.m. and had dinner.  They left at 6 p.m. to return home to Harare and Tyler went with them as he is off to spend a couple days in Harare with a urologist seeing patients and then going to Victoria Falls for a few days before leaving next Sunday.

Last night I went to bed at 8:30 p.m. exhausted and woke up at 6:30 a.m.!  Started my 4 loads of laundry to get all the linen used by the visitors cleaned before the next lot and got 2 done before the electricity went off at 10 a.m.! What a week!

 Teaching at the workshop

 Staff who attended

 Mrs. Isala lighting the birthday cake for her husband

 Dr. Isala blowing out the candles


 Saying goodbye to Tyler at devotions

 Tyler helping Harare surgeon and our doctors


Tyler doing some suturing with Dr. Isala

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