Interesting Cases

I am learning so much at the hospital! It's really fabulous. The doctors encourage us to carry around notebooks to jot down anything and to take pictures of patients and surguries. Then to go home at night and look up the things we did not know from that day. Usually the day starts with taking patients with Dr. Om. This is always great, but if he is busy he doesn't have time to translate to us so we just guess what is wrong from the hand gestures and disposition of the patient. He tells us the symptoms of the patient and asks us to diagnose what we think is wrong. Since none of us are medical students, we are most always wrong but it is still fun to take a stab at it. He usually sees about 15-20 patients in the morning which we sit in for and jot down notes. Most people who are coming in for to see Dr. Om are complaining about some sort of abdominal pain. The ER is also fun too. Here are a few interesting cases in the last few days:

*A man came in to the ER with HORRIBLE burns on his face and chest and most of his abdomen. He had been making a big pot of dal (the lentil soup stuff that Nepalis eat with rice) and had someone spilled the entire pot of boiling dal on his face and abdomen. I tried to figure out how he did this, but really couldn't. The doctors said something about taht he was adjusting a curtain and it spilled. But I don't see why he would have a boiling pot of dal on the top shelf of a book shelf or something. Anyhow he was pretty horribly burned. he was covered in blisters and had bad skin damage on his front. So we watched in the ER procedure room as they cleaned off all the spilt dal, then popped all the massive burn blisters with tweezers which were filled with a watery yellow fluid. Then they peeled off all the burned skin. Then they poured saline all over him and put an antibiotic cream on his face and abdomen. He also had burn blisters in his ears which looked painful. He was then dressed in a few layers of gauze and given a pain killer.

*A woman with septisimia. This is the woman who later "expired" and caused hoardes of riot police to come to the hospital and guard it. I watched the surgery where they operated on her to try to clean out the infection. She was about 20 years old.

*A man with triple positive tuberculosis.

*A man with tuberculosis. I got to listen to his chest and hear how crackly it was. He had a fever for about a month and had not eaten or had an appetite for a month. His tuberculosis was very bad as could be heard from his chest.

*A man with typhoid. He had all the symptoms of typhoid which Dr. Gupta taught us. He also taught us how to test for typhoid depending on how long the patient has had symptoms. This method is called "basu." The first week blood will test positive, second week agglutiation will be positive, third week stool will be positive and fourth week urine will be positive. It is interesting to be doing this work here in Nepal because I get to see alot of diseases that I would never see in US like alot of typhoid, some possible malaria, and alot of tuberculosis. There is the Tuberculosis hosptial near by which I plan to visit soon.