Andrew seeking adventures

Andrew with Devil's Peak in the background

I visited the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital  (RCWMCH) this week and am very excited to start working there on Monday.   It seems like I will have an intense and fast paced three months working in the burn unit because when we were meeting Dr. Rode, he just finished treating a patient who had burns over 50% of his body—this is bread and butter for him and this was only the start of his day…at 8am.  As we walked through the ward, I heard a baby wail as his dressings were being changed—the gravity of the work I’ll be doing finally sunk in.

I’m also excited because Dr. Rode said that I might be able to get involved with a research project evaluating burn management in the field (i.e. on the ambulance).  I hope to use my experience as an EMT to this project.

I also met Dr. Roux-Martinez, a trauma surgeon, who gave our group a tour of the wards and learned some interesting facts.  I’m bewildered that there’s no housing regulation for the townships because the vast majority of the patients the burn unit sees are kids from the townships whose tin houses can heat up to 2000 degrees in a matter of seconds.

Besides the internship sight visits this week, myself and 8 other students hiked Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain.  This was one hell of an adventure considering we had to trail blaze our way down the side of the mountain because we decided to take another trail down than the one we went up on.   I was so nervous when we had to scale down some big rocks and couldn’t locate a trail for a good hour and a half—but finally we all made it down in one piece.