Recap of the week.

So my mother asked for more information on what I am doing in clinic so here goes :) our hospital that we work at is Victoria hospital. It is a secondary state hospital which means that patients have no insurance and are referred to the hospital from their primary care physician. The children's ward has around 35 beds. The main part of the room has 20 beds dedicated to general medicine problems (ie asthma, croup, failure to thrive, etc). We see a lot of asthma patients in the hospital because they don't send kids home with nebulizers. The need for Nebs is an automatic admission every time they have an uncontrolled acute asthma attack. There is then a section off to the left with 5 beds dedicated to children over the age of 5. Peds over here only goes through age 12. Then there is a section to the right with 10 beds for gastro (diarrhea/vomitting/dehydration) patients. Some interesting cases I have seen include tetralogy of fallot, failure to thrive, cerebral palsy, sickle cell anemia, and possible munchausen. The great part of being in peds is that I'm getting to see my own patients every day. I'm still having trouble with the medications since they have very different treatment regiments than we do in the US but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. Our daily clinic has a different focus each day. Monday- general medicine Tuesday- HIV Wednesday- allergy Thursday- asthma Friday- sickle cell/ general. The charts are all placed in one pile and everyone just pulls a chart and continues seeing patients until they are all done. Patients wait a while and aren't seen by the same people each time but are just thankful to be receiving care. During ward work time in the afternoon I help out by doing rapid HIV tests, mantouxs (same as PPD for TB testing), anthropometry (height/weight/head circumference) and taking general birth histories. We usually leave at three for the day and repeat it all again the next :)

As far as tourist stuff goes we have been very busy recently. Last week we visited camps bay and had dinner during sunset. The next day we went to Clifton beach and enjoyed soaking up some sunlight. Friday night we went out downtown on a street named Long street. We ate at a well known restaurant named Mama Africa. I had the BEST stuffed squash. I'm not even kidding when I say I ate half of a butternut squash. Just fabulous. After dinner we enjoyed some of the local nightlife. I continued the trend of eating great food at bobs bar.. Holly and I shared a basket of onion rings that were to die for. The next morning we went back downtown to the green market and pan Africa market. I was able to get all of my gift shopping in! We then enjoyed lunch at Zula bar. After lunch we headed to the business district of Cape Town. There we saw the building where Nelson Mandela first addressed the country of Africa after being released from prison. Then we went to company garden around the buildings of parliament. The gardens were so beautiful. We were able to sit on the lawn for awhile and watch some local acrobatic performers. That night we attended the Cape Town carnival which is a huge parade. The costumes and floats were stunning. Today we enjoyed a drive down the ocean highway to cape point and boulder beach to see the penguins. I forgot sunscreen and now look like a lobster. Oh well :)