I woke up extra early so that I could be in to work by 7:15 to help Tiny collect the gastric aspirate on one of our patients. I was super excited, but nervous that the mom might have fed the baby or something, which had happened on previous occasions. Everything went smoothly, though, and Tiny showed up a few minutes after I did. She talked me through everything, and I managed to get the NG tube in without too much trouble, but when I pulled back on the syringe nothing came out. Tiny didn’t go through all of the things I’ve seen nurses in the States do to check whether the tube was in the right place – residents tend to cut corners, it’s a bad habit – so I hesitated a bit when she told me to flush the tube with saline. She ended up taking over, and after a bit of finagling we got the sample. I was bummed that I hadn’t gotten it, but I figured I just need to get a little more practice.
Dr. Kung didn’t have to worry about making it to clinic, so there was a little bit less of a rush to get through rounds, but our team was set to admit today, which meant that the afternoon might get pretty busy. Dr. Kung decided not to have the residents do pre-rounds, and we all just started seeing everyone together. We quickly realized that at least one of the new patients needed an X-ray, but apparently the X-ray machines had joined the CT scanner in whatever revolt they seemed to be staging, and we had to refer out to private for that too. Since we needed to pick up the paperwork from social work for the two kids from Thursday, plus a request that Tiny put in sometime yesterday, I headed over to the social work office to gauge the likelihood of getting our new requests approved.
The good news was that one of the kids from Tuesday and the one from Wednesday had been approved. The bad news was that we were missing the mom’s ID card number on one of the forms for the other child, so we had to resubmit the paperwork. They didn’t completely shut us down, though, because they said that if I completed it and brought it back, they could have it ready by 2. They also agreed to have the new paperwork finished by then (why so much faster this time, I have no idea). I didn’t want to walk all the way back to the other side of the hospital and back, so I dropped in to visit Kat in the A&E and called Dr. Kung to get the information I needed. I think I shocked the social work staff by reappearing in less than 10 minutes, probably a record here.
Ducked back into the ward to finish rounds, then took the new paperwork to the social worker’s office before they left for lunch at 1. Since Dr. Kung was going to the department M&M (morbidity and mortality report, not the candy), I decided to go ahead and take lunch myself. I had brought ramen, because there’s a microwave at work, but I realized that I didn’t have anything to cook it in, so I walked home. Julia goes home for lunch every day, so we chatted while I cooked my food. We had been planning to try to go to Serowe, another town a little further from Gabs that has a rhino sanctuary, this weekend. We called the sanctuary to reserve a chalet, but were told that they were fully booked for this weekend and next. Boo.
I took longer for lunch than I meant to, because it’s a 15 minute walk back to UB, so by the time I got back to the hospital it was already 2. I went straight to the social work office, and seriously sat there for 45 minutes waiting to get my paperwork. The woman who had been helping me before took the papers and disappeared when I arrived, while the rest of the staff in the office did the following: the woman in one corner fell asleep, the guy next to me listened to music on his phone and read the newspaper, the woman in the opposite corner listened to music or watched some kind of video on her computer, and the other guy read the news on his computer. After a while the guy listening to music started chatting with me about sports. Seriously people?
I did finally get the paperwork I needed, so I walked back to the ward with a vague sense of accomplishment, tempered by a much stronger feeling of astonishment at the ridiculousness I had just witnessed. Once I’d handed off the paperwork to Tiny, I started on the second set of May charts that I had dug out of the horrid A&E storage room the previous day. Dr. Kung and I went over my questions over the first set of charts, then I stayed late to make up for the time I’d lost over lunch.
Home, dinner, early to bed because I had to get up early.
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