Today (Monday) was a whirlwind day. We were in Murchison Falls National Park this morning, and after an early day game drive, we flew back to Entebbe and then drove to Kampala. After a quick stop at the guest house, we headed back to Mulago to get to work. The first surgical case was already underway. One of the local surgeons actually took the lead on the case, as Dr. Mike Mill of UNC, this trip’s surgeon, assisted. We had 12 patients waiting for us to be screened – that’s half a day’s load. We certainly appreciated the break that yesterday’s trip provided, but it’s hard not to feel at least a little guilty about taking such an incredible trip with so much work to be done.
Today’s patients had some very unusual findings, and as you can probably imagine, that is usually not good for them. One patient was an add-on with truncus arteriosus, admitted with respiratory distress and failure to thrive. Another was an adolescent with an enormous PDA and what is likely severe pulmonary hypertension. A third had severe pulmonary stenosis and what seemed like almost no pulmonary blood flow. Sometimes the things we see here can be depressing because we could do so much more back home, but can’t do anything but wait while here. Other times – as was the case a few times today - it’s depressing because we can’t do much at home, either, and that means we have even less here.
Tomorrow should be one of the busier screening days, and of course, we have a lot of kids in-house to check on. Now that we’re in our second week, though, our departure date is creeping up on us and we want to get as much done as possible.
More to come later…
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