Not your typical rainy Saturday

Today is the kind of day you want to curl up with a book or watch movies all day and not have to leave the house. But today wasn't a typical lazy, rainy Saturday for me. It started at 8 am with hospital rounds (we get to sleep in 30 mins longer on weekends). I rounded with the doctors in the adult wards. In adults, we see more of a variety of diagnoses – a man with abdominal pain going for surgery today, a woman with pneumonia that will probably not live much longer, a girl with a snake bite who still has a lot of swelling of her arm, a man having a sickle cell crisis. I saw 2 babies delivered today... the midwives told me to come back and they will let me deliver the next baby! I figure in the 4 months I will be here, that is definitely something I need to learn to do. It was pouring down rain and I walked to lunch down the muddy road – when it's a dirt road there's no way for you not to get muddy shoes, but at least I had an umbrella! After lunch it was still raining, but I went back up to the hospital and checked on some of the kids that had been admitted for malaria and were receiving blood. And then I helped in a wound dressing change – this teenager had a burn over his entire back and we had to sedate him in order to change his dressing. It was one of the worst ones I have seen. So that's been my Saturday so far... and it's only 3 pm! Maybe I will relax a little this afternoon...