Day #4

Awesome day! 

We had our first weekday formal rounds this morning starting at 8. We did post-take rounds which I mentioned previously.  Probably the most interesting case was a young cabbage farmer who poisoned himself with pesticide.  It’s one of those board questions that you study for but never see in real life – what to do for organophosphate poisoning?  But here was the board question in real life! Fortunately I think he will be safe and hopefully better soon.

Then we proceeded to women’s ward to make rounds.  It was interesting, but apparently rounds here last a whole lot longer than we’re accustomed to in the States!  We rounded from 9am until about 3 pm with no break for lunch!  Afterward we headed to the canteen for some matoke and g-nut sauce.

There was supposed to be a Ugandan resident-lead chest X-ray lecture for the medical students at 3, but since we rounded so late all the residents were busy.  So Anem and I volunteered to give the CXR interpretation lecture on the fly.  I think it was a success since only 1 of the 30 students fell asleep during our hour-long talk.  It was a lot of fun!

Then we came back to our house to study a bit on all these diseases we never see at home.  There’s another crew here from UVA and we planned on going to a dinner tonight with some of the Mbarara University folks.  I expected a regular dinner at a semi-nice restaurant, but to our surprise it was much fancier!  Mbarara used this occasion to honor UVA for all their work here, specifically my mentor Dr Moore who they named an official “visiting professor” of the university here.  They had this dinner at a wonderful Ugandan cultural museum outside of town.  It was complete with Ugandan food, wine, and even tribal dancing!  I sat next to the student body president and we discussed the recently signed law making homosexuality illegal and also banning miniskirts and pornography. Perhaps more on that later!  It was a wonderful night – unfortunately I thought we were just going to a regular dinner so I didn’t take my camera.  Anem took some pictures and videos of the dancing so I’ll post those at some point when I have more bandwith.  Between all the excitement and still not adjusting to my jet lag I’m really tired … hence the short post!  More details later!