We started our rotations on the wards today, I chose to begin with Paediatrics. Right from the get go I felt really energized and excited to learn, a feeling I hadn’t really felt to the same degree since the first couple of months of medical school. Seeing actual patients with signs and symptoms of illnesses I had previously didactically heard about made me very interested in learning about them. Especially here in Vanuatu, where resources are low, you learn much quicker and you see diseases in their full presentation. So my homework for today is to learn more about some the case I saw, here are a few:
- Pott’s Disease (with potential superimposed tertiary syphilis)
- Necrotizing enterocolitis in a newborn and the Kramer score for Jaundice
- Physical presentations of Lupus
- And brush up on developmental stages and trisomy 13/18 deformities
The list is a bit long and makes me wish I had retained more from my lecture but I’m excited to look them up tonight. Tomorrow I’ll be working with the same amazing group of doctors, which may be why I enjoyed today so much. Dr. Sale is a first year resident who I worked closely with today and he’s awesome. The rounds and clinics here are a lot like back home, minus some of the technological luxuries. What they don’t have in modern innovation, the docs here easily make up with creativity and ingenuity. For example they don’t have proper needles to draw blood from young children and newborn, so they’ve devised a method of breaking off a 22 gauge needle to collect blood in a tube for labs, and old plastic gloves are used as tourniquets whenever possible. Anyways, I’m off to do my homework, night!
The Medical Vagabond 