We were in the OR a l l d a y l o n g . . . yesterday. Everyone on the team except me (I'm going this weekend with Bea and Mike) and a couple nurses who worked in the ICU all weekend went on safari and weren't getting back until Monday afternoon, including both of our anesthesiologists. You can't do open hearts without anesthesiologists right? So I enjoyed my weekend, well you already know about Saturday (did a "quick" open heart in the morning and had an even quicker nervous breakdown in the afternoon). Recovered from that and had a great Sunday, went to church in the morning, came home and blogged as much as I could before this old head forgot everything and one of my patients from last year (Precious! no, that's her name!) and her parents came to Tenwek to visit me. We've kept in touch over the past year via email and my blog. They live 80 km from Tenwek, and it was so good to see them. Precious gave me 2 thank you cards thanking me for her surgery last year (sweet little thing made me cry) with a big old chocolate candy bar inside.
They left around 7 pm after waiting to get evaluated by Dr. Mike with a quick ECHO in the lab here. After walking them to their car I went to dinner with James and Caroline, the hospital chaplain that did Roger's burial on Tuesday that I met at church on Sunday. I could have stayed int heir home all night, such nice people. And their little girl's name in my Sunday post is Faith (of course) and their oldest daughter is named Grace (of course). More about my visit with them later. It was very cool having a traditional Kenyan dinner with a family.
When I got home Sunday night, the group was having a conference about all the new patients seen in the clinic and I was told we were doing 2 patients on Monday (yesterday). Dr. Malik was coming back early from safari and the case was starting first thing in the morning, and Hoang the other perfusionist wasn't coming back until the afternoon so I scrambled like I'd never scrambled to get the case going. Had I known we were operating on Monday morning, I would have spent all of Sunday afternoon setting up in the OR to be ready. Converting the adult pump to a pediatric pump and making everything work with the bits and pieces of stuff we have takes forever. The biggest problem is we don't know where anything is, and we only had a couple hours to get ready before our first case this year when I've always had 2 full days in the past to rummage through everything and get it organized.
The first case went very well, my buddy Bea from San Diego was here. We worked together at San Diego Children's for several years. It was weird looking up and seeing her at the table again, but down here at Tenwek. As soon as the first case was over with, we had to turn the room over and do another case (the little girl on her father's shoulder in church yesterday) and room turn overs are even quicker and we were even futher behind so I had to ask the team to chill while Hoang and I got caught up. The second case went very well also. We were able to extubate (remove the breathing tubes) both patients on the table in the OR before transporting them to the ICU. We were cleaning up the room around 9:00 last night and were told that our conference was starting so Hoang and I went back to the guesthouse kitchen for conference (my real reason was to hydrate, the OR's here are so hot and sticky you feel like you can drink a swimming pool). After conference (I was too tired to pay attention, but drank 4 glasses of water) Hoang and I went back down to the OR to set up the pump for today. We couldn't find any reservoirs for the cell saver machine (it processes the shed blood from surgery and washes it so we can return the patients own red blood cells back to them instead of giving them someone elses banked blood) and we weren't even sure if there were any more cardioplegia sets left (the devices we need to cool the solution down to less than 10 degrees to stop the heart (yeah, no cardiac surgery if you can't stop the heart to operate).
We McGuyver'd a few things and set up the pump so I'm a few steps ahead this morning. HATE making anyone on the team wait, and it's NOT gonna happen again today. I'm pumping the first case and Hoang is doing the 2nd case. Her first case with my surgeon from Vanderbilt. Will be very stressful for her, but she'll do fine. Would be nice to have some time to edit some photos and keep up with my week, but not sure that will happen. I got back to the room last night and got in bed after 12:30, so 5:45 am came way too early this morning. Hope there's coffee in the kitchen (someone took the cream I brought for my coffee, don't cry honey it'll be OK).
We found out in conference last night we're going to be doing 2 pediatric patients per day today, Wednesday and Thursday and nothing on Friday since we leave for safari. My roomie did tell me just now that there's internet at the safari so that will be nice.
Gotta run... I just want lunch today....
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3 comments:
So cool that you got to see Precious!!!! Also, very cool to eat with Faith's family, glad your cases are going so well!
I am also glad that you'll get to go on the safari next weekend, Luke loved it! I was selfishly disappointed that you didn't go already, as I thought you'd be posting incredible pictures!!!! But I'll see them soon enough! ;) Have a great day!
Hi Bea and Uncle Mike!!! So glad you could join the party with Tom.
What a way to begin your week, but so happy you were able to have some alone, down time this weekend visiting with Precious and her family and enjoying the Kenyan life. Hopefully you were able to catch up on some rest in the process since it doesn't sound like you are going to get much this week until Friday.
Love you and miss you and will anxiously await more photos to come.
Oh and by the way..... not sure how you are doing that coffee black!!!!!
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