My shoulder is much better now although still a twinge of pain if in wrong position ie. extend it back too far. I’m not taking any more ibuprofen for pain now. Have been able to do surgeries ok. Have you ever tried to play volleyball with only your left hand when you are right handed? Not trying to do much of that although I have learned to serve a fair left-handed serve.
The hospital work seems to be ho-hum or same things recurrent. Oh yes we had a 3 inch bladder stone the other day, several prostatectomies and urethral stricture dilations. A c-section every so often for various indications including two the past week that the uterus was beginning to rupture. One had a live baby and the other baby had been dead for awhile. One patient was quite different. A lady had an apparent mass in the abdomen that turned out to be a greatly enlarged hypertrophied stomach and almost no visible intestines; very atrophic. I was not sure what to do so I did a pyloroplasty opening up the outlet of the stomach (the duodenum was visible). Amazingly she is recovering and eating and the abdomen appears more nearly normal now so we let her go home today. We had a ruptured appendix a few days ago doing well and went home today. The malaria and typhoid seems to be letting up a little bit although we are still getting rain almost daily.
Today was a different kind of day. We got a call about 0800 wondering if there was some way we could help the MCD (district medical officer, the guy that has given so much problems to the hospital in the past). He had taken the 4-wheel drive high clearance ambulance with its driver out to a remote village and got stuck in the mud. He spent the night out in the bush with the mosquitoes etc. Several people had tried to get it out of the mud but it was pretty thoroughly buried when we got to it. Jamie took the hospital pickup and I took our Toyota 4 runner (which has a winch) out to where they were at. If one got off the “road” at all it was like quicksand very soft mud. We had to go through water was almost to the top of the wheels especially the last kilometer. We fastened the back of my car with chain to a nearby tree and hooked the winch to the ambulance and we were able to pull him out with some difficulty. Jamie had to be pulled out also as he had gotten out of the “road” slightly. Then we had to back up through the deep water to a place where we could turn around. After that I got in a soft spot and had to winch ourselves out. We had just gotten back to Bere when there was a call that Augustine with his car and a pickup bringing a bunch of pipe to the hospital were stuck near Kelo so we took off again. It turned out that the pickup had worked out of the mud when we got there but Augustine had run out of gasoline. His gauge does not work. I had my gas can with me so we went back to a spot that had some gasoline and bought some and took it back to Augustine. The trip back to Bere was uneventful other than the deep belly dragging holes and water over the road in places. The MCD now says that I am his best friend and was very profuse in his thanks.
Dolores has been busy painting the walls and rough cement floors of Danae and Olen’s house. It involved a lot of stuff moving so could do all the floors. She painted the shelves under the kitchen counter tops in our new house one day this week.
We are in good health other than minor aches and pains sometimes.
Our emails are drbland@sbcglobal.net and dfbland01@gmail.com
Love, Rollin and Dolores
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