Carl on surgery and politics

So there was a dramatic change from last week. Monday we still didn’t do much at our internship, so we were still skeptical about it. But then on Tuesday we did the ward rounds and the doctors had us follow them and the med students around afterwards. We got to examine x-rays and see them take an external fixation off of a little boy. It was kinda of shocking seeing this because they told us we were going to the “pop room” to watch the procedure, and it turned out they just did it in the hallway outside of the theater (surgery ward). Also, they didn’t give the kid pain killers before taking the metal rods out of his leg, all he received were some antibiotics. 

Then today all three of us got to go into the surgery room. For surgeries that Avery and Janiel watched, they didn’t scrub in. The procedures they did were also not very invasive and pretty short, lasting only about an hour and a half. Then came my turn. A few hours before I was told that the surgery that I was going into was three to four hours long, and there would be a lot of blood. This got me a little worried because I watched a video of an ACL surgery once before and I became very nauseous. But when it came time to scrub in and cut open the young girl I was completely fine. The most uncomfortable part was having to keep my hands in front of me and having the lead vest on for four hours.

I was a little surprised of the intensity of scrubbing in and not touching anything other then your hands and sterile surfaces because of the procedure I witnessed yesterday. The purpose of the surgery was to fix a dislocated femur. The procedure that we did was shorten the femur and insert a bone graft into the pelvis. So the only really gross part was when we actually had to cut a chunk out of the femur and pelvis. 

––––––

For lunch today, one of the med students brought us to a pub down the road. It was a quaint little place, and while we were there we talked about a series of things. He gave us his personal opinion of how corrupt anything is that is run by the government and that it was better to do everything privately rather then use the government. He told us that any contracting that needed to be done was contracted to friends and family of the government officials. So all the money stayed in one circle. Then he also said how bad the police and judicial system were here and how if you use the governmental postal system you will most likely get your stuff stolen. I thought that all of this was shocking.  I believe that if any of the last three things was occurrent in the USA none of it would be tolerated. 
––––––

Carl with Kyla-Rose of FreshlyGround at Kirstenbosch Summer Concert