And so it begins

(A picture from Ethel's camera from our night out at Mimmo's in Maseru on Friday.)

3/23 and it’s 10:45 so I’m going to bed soon. My first clinical day at Motebang started with hearing that the baby from last night had died and ended with a few minutes of chest compressions on a 40ish-year-old woman who died. In between were patients who were all sicker than almost any patient I had ever seen prior. When I inexplicably lost my IP address and couldn’t communicate with America I could hardly keep from crying. I was more wiped out than I could even realize when I walked home with Ethel around 6:30 to borrow a big pot from Sister Lucy at the convent and start the barley mushroom soup project. Thank god we had beer in the fridge and Dr. Phil coming for dinner, because I might have just slinked into my bedroom and laid there until morning. Instead we had a really nice evening of planning our desert island belongings and researching Greek gods over warm, healthy tastiness.

Wow, overload on temporal wasting, though. Every one of these patients could be a “momentous really sick patient” whose social and spiritual history I will always remember from medical school. But, since the entire population of a small hospital is that sick, I don’t think I’ll have the chance to get to know them in such a personal way. On the upside – I’ll get to draw a bunch of blood, build autonomy, gain perspective on health and death, and will get to generally muddle through in ways the American system protects me from but which will make me a wiser and more independent doctor. Ahh! Profiting from the sick feels like such a moral paradox. But this is what the world is like, and here I am learning to help. And tomorrow I’ll be a little less overwhelmed and a little more effective.

I am so glad I have six weeks here, not ten days, not four weeks. I want to give a full picture of what I saw today but I don’t have that picture yet and I certainly don’t have the energy to try to write it down tonight.

I’ll leave you with a funny image, though. Each ward of the hospital is in a separate one-story brick building connected by cement walkways and in view of incredible, rocky mountains. Ethel and I were walking a blood sample to the lab building and walked out of the female medical ward to the connecting walkway. There we saw a three-year-old boy with his pants around his knees peeing onto the wheel of an empty wheelchair. He looked up at us with a vague smile of innocent greeting. Dumela abooti!

Good night.