The weekend

Happy Monday everybody. I'll take a moment here to talk about my weekend. One of the things I did was to walk down the hospital drive to the road. There has been a little market set up there. I think the market only exists because of all the people coming and going to the hospital and caregivers buying food for their patients. An interesting thing about this hospital is that every person that gets admitted has to be admitted with a caregiver (usually a family member). This caregiver is the person that makes sure things gets done and their patient gets fed as the hospital doesn't really have a meal service. Another example of something a caregiver might do is today we ordered a medication (praziquantel) which after the nurse checked with pharmacy it turned out we only had two pills left. We wrote the information on a small sheet of paper and the caregiver had to go to Bamenda to pick up a 3 days worth of medication. My main purpose of going to the market was to get a SIM card for my phone. I was on "back-up" call for the weekend in case the "residents" had any questions, but I had no phone in my house and there was no way for them to get a hold of me. I was able to purchase a SIM card (I think it was bootleg since it had already been punched out of the carton and there was no manual) and some minutes for 2000 CFA, or about $5. I apprecate that T-mobile was willing to unlock my phone a few years ago when I was in India, I have heard of other people not having had such luck with their cell phone providers. What the residents apparently do is "beep" you by calling, but expecting you not to pick up. You then call them back. The reason for this is that receiving calls is free, and we have more money for minutes than they do. Apparently this is a common enough practice in Africa that there is even a function through the phone carrier just to send a free "call me back" text message.

I spent some time the OPD (out patient department) on Saturday morning and I'm pretty sure my skin test will be positive when I return. A patient came in for "cough," although it turns out not only just cough but also weight loss, an infiltrate on chest x-ray and a positive PPD. He was already put on 4 drug Tb treatment (comes as a single combination pill rifampin, isoniazid, pyrazinamide, ethambutol) in Yaounde and came in because his cough was getting worse. Great, not only will I get Tb, but drug resistant Tb at that.

On Sunday I went to church. I The service was surprisingly understandable given my previous difficulties understanding Cameroonian "English." The service was two hours long beating out Park Avenue Methodist's service by a few minutes. I took a Sunday afternoon nap (haven't been able to do that for a while) and afterward went to the Spark's house for dinner. Dr. Sparks is a surgeon formerly at UCSD who is running the PAACS surgery residency here at Mbingo. We had homemade pizza and watched the movie "Amazing Grace;" it turned out to be the second time I've seen that movie and I realized it is a very good movie.