All things continue about the same except today we had a visiting pachyderm. Early this morning Gary Roberts, our mission pilot for Adventist Medical Aviation brought a small elephant, perhaps a year-old, in his small plane from about an hour away. He was from a herd that had about half of the 120 elephants killed by poachers. Gary heard about it, found it, rescued it, and brought it to the air strip here. He has been in touch with various agencies and elephant specialists and a vetanarian. Some people from Malawi are supposed to arrive here in a few days to care for it and get it moved to somewhere. The elephant was dehydrated and having diarrhea. The village where he got the elephant had been giving it cow's milk which elephants don’t do well on. Imagine carrying an elephant like this in a small plane which was actually quite a dangerous to do. He made it to here, but Gary said he would not go any long distance with the elephant unless he was sedated well. The little guy is cute and affectionate maybe hungry. He gets diluted baby formula now. He had some infection on his neck where he had been tied up by the village. Apparently government officials at several levels were involved or at least not preventing the killing then the villagers cleaned up all the meat and only bones left in a pile that Gary saw. Eventually he will be in a park in the eastern part of the country next to Sudan.
We had a volvulus of the terminal ilium and cecum that had been too long so we had to do a bowel resection and reanastamosis. We took out about 4 ft of bowel. He is doing well now 4 days post op eating and drinking and walking. We had two fistula repairs this past week. One was a vessico-uterine fistula with urine coming out her cervix and another was a vessico-vaginal fistula that we had reconstructed a urethra and tried to close her fistula before but this time only a small hole so hopefully it will hold this time.
We were privileged to have a student anesthetist (almost ready to graduate) and his professor here for a few days this past week. They both seem interested in coming back on a more long term basis. The student’s wife is a family practice physician.
We had a rain shower last night that made it very muggy today. We also had a nice rain March 1 which it is not supposed to rain in March so strange weather. It is still warm with lows about 85 to 90 and the humidity is up now.
Love, Rollin and Dolores
Our emails are drbland@sbcglobal.net and dfbland01@gmail.net
