Worms Everywhere

Yesterday was a rather exciting day in the OR here at Tenwek. I hadn’t seen any arrow wounds or other such excitement yet like I did on my last trip. We had a standby procedure in the OR in the morning with a pediatric case to-follow in the afternoon. so it was a lot more relaxed than the day before. While I was finishing setting up the pump for the second case Eric came into the room and said, “Tom, take your camera and go into the next OR now – take your camera and go now Tom!”.

OK, so I’ve gotten kind of a reputation around Tenwek as the camera guy and I knew not to question him, so I just follow his directions.

When I got into the next room one of the general surgeons that I'd met while at Tenwek was operating on a young child who had round worms... lots of them.  When I got into the room the surgeon had a large bowl (about the size of Susie's favorite salad bowl) half filled with worms that she was removing from an incision in the the patient's intestine.  It was pretty shocking really. 

She was initially holding a suction into the intestinal incision and was removing the worms with the suction.  There were so many that she was able to reach in with a sponge forceps and grab them to remove them manually. 

The patient had contracted the round worms from oral-fecal contamination and was admitted to the hospital with symptoms of a bowel obstruction.  The whole procedure was pretty amazing.

I returned to the cardiac OR for my procedure only to be summoned to the OR on the other side of my room for a patient with "wadoodoo's" coming out of his foot.  You'll have to wait for that one tomorrow.  It's 1:00 am and we're leaving Tenwek tomorrow morning to go on safari for 3 days.  I'm not sure if I'll have internet at the Masa Mara  but will try to post the wadoodoo story in the morning before I leave at 9:30.

We finished all of our surgeries for the week this morning.  All the patient's are doing well and it's hard to believe our time at Tenwek will be over in the morning.  This afternoon a group of us walked up to Montigo Hill.  It was about an 85 mile walk (well it felt like that anyway) and of course I took a couple hundred pictures.  I'm hoping to have some down-time on safari to post some more shots of Tenwek.  Kenya is spectacular right now with all of the rain they've been having. 

More tomorrow, hopefully...