Thanks, Sister Charity

Sister Charity folds my sleeping bag. So strange. She is one of the few young nuns at the convent and is often the one to clean our guest house while we're off at work (I know, we get good service here). She knows a little bit of English and, though it took us 20 minutes to communicate the question, asked me and Joe to take her picture in a civilian dress for some kind of job application. She stayed for dinner Sunday night and after she left we started wondering if we were aiding a convent escape. It turns out she's applying to enroll in 8th grade to finish her schooling. Super cute.

So yesterday all the registrars were gone and the attendings left around noon so Joe and I were the only ones working the wards with the nurses. Nothing beyond our means came up, which was nice, and we had the ObGyn medical director if we really needed something, but it was still a day with a different kind of feeling, a feeling that we were the go-to people for 20 sick patients. I suppose residency is just around the corner and it's just as well we get used to writing orders that actually get implemented. In most ways it feels like about time. It's nice to have my IV skills back. I do more here than I ever did riding first truck at Bangs, even. Starting clinical day nine I feel like an old pro. My second LP went even better than the first despite my fasciculating, writhing patient needing to be physically subdued by Fadya, who apparently was a high school wrestler (not really).

Well, I'd better take a little census here and update the list for the team before they get back from their administrative sleep-over party in Maseru. The walk down the hill today was a little chilly in our scrubs. I think autumn is in Lesotho ("Man is in the Forest." Why a Bambi reference? I don't know, but it takes me back to Walter and Nilda's house in New Haven just after the twins were born. That was one scary flick.) I woke up feeling like my second week was almost over and that time was actually flying by here. I think the last few days have been "settling in" days. Already the deaths seem drastically different emotionally than they did last week, the sunken eyes oddly normalized, the CD4 counts under 50 par for the course. I still have a baseline feeling of horror that accompanies me everywhere but it's much less distracting than before. OK, better run. Thanks to everyone who's gotten in touch. Nan, so good to see your face on Skype yesterday, if only briefly before we lost the connection. Rock it out, Duncettes!