Avery waiting to see what's next

Janiel, Carl & Avery at their interhsip

This week we started our internships. Myself and two other students Janiel, and Carl walked ourselves to Maitland Cottage Orthopedic hospital where the matron Ms. Schriber greeted us quickly and warmly before introducing us to the physical therapist on duty, Zara.  She has been working at Maitland Cottage for a few years and in that time has accumulated a large amount of expertise on how to deal with children and the various cases that are both common in the specialty hospital and rare in most countries. As she described to us the different ailments that we would be seeing- Cerebral Palsy, Blount’s disease, club foot, severe fractures and other cases that the hospital worked on I became more aware of how very important this hospital was to the children who needed special and intensive care.

             

She warned that some of the children were in severe pain and that we shouldn’t be alarmed when in the ward- if we show fear than the patients would become anxious. The key in a pediatric hospital is to don a face that says to the world that everything is going wonderfully- even if the sight of the child plastered from head to toe and hung in a sling shatters your heart. Everything has to appear just fine.

            

Naturally, walking into the first ward I was apprehensive, expecting to see little heart monitors whirring and hear long suffering moans from each bed. On the contrary, we walked into the girl’s ward where each wall had 25 beds lining it and from each bed a small head popped up and waved as we entered.  All of my apprehension ebbed away as we stopped by each bed and chatted with the girls they were so bubbly and happy.  Some were in neighboring beds braiding each other’s hair, others chatted happily to their teddies in Xhosa- I was immediately smitten by each of them.  The Boy’s ward was a whole different beast. As we did a walk through we had to jump out of the way of boys in leg braces racing down the hall hopping on one foot, others pulling out each other’s eyelashes, a few at the end getting into mischief with the crank on the end of the suspension bed. In other words, being perfectly normal boys.

The kids are wonderful in everyway but I have to admit I am a little disheartened by the internship itself since the first day. It is hard for me to say this without sounding ungrateful because I understand the work put into the arrangement of everything.  I think it is not what I expected with the hands on experience. We have at this point only been able to facilitate rehab procedures on two patients between the three of us for about 10 minutes total. In the rest of the time that we have, we are either entertaining the children (which is amazing) or waiting for Zara to do rounds in the ward.  I hope this doesn’t come across as a complaint- I enjoy going in to help, but I cant help but feel like I am actually more in the way there than making a difference. I feel like a volunteer and not an intern.  We were also informed that in a week there would be two more interns arriving and we would all split the work, they will have priority however because they set up their internship before we did and they are medical students and thus have more expertise. I will be saddened if I begin to feel useless to a project that I believe is doing great things for an impoverished community. I want to dive in and use whatever skills I have to make a difference. That is what I came here to do, and I will not be satisfied with myself until I feel that I have achieved that goal.  I will give it some more time to figure this all out- I think at the moment we are content. I am fine with being content but I would almost rather be uncomfortable. By uncomfortable I mean the idea of facing a new challenge everyday that I have never before encountered and may never again experience. I want to be presented with issues and asked my opinions on how to best solve them- I am ready to be pushed further than anyone else has ever demanded that I push myself.  I think this is the reason why I am here and how I can best learn from Cape Town.