Thursday, February 9, 2017

The Bare Essentials

If there’s one thing that this whole experience will teach me, it’s how to be a physician even when you don’t have all the cool gadgets. I can’t say everything is completely FDA approved, but it seems to work out just fine down here.

Lesson 1: When a child comes into your clinic with a temperature close to 40 C (104 F) you have one response: cool them down quick. I learned this lesson three times today from three pediatric patients who had temperatures just under 40 C. We give the Paracetamol and wet their bodies with a rag and warm water so that through evaporation their temperatures lower. This all for the purpose of presenting febrile seizures, which is no bueno.


Lesson 2: If you don’t have a Doppler ultrasound, or any ultrasound for that matter all you need is a good stethoscope, able hands, and great hearing. Today seemed to be OB day at the clinic for the community and the physician taught me how to do Leopold Maneuvers in order to figure out the position of the fetus and how to pick up heart tones with just a stethoscope. Pretty cool stuff, but I still have a lot of practice to do there.

Lesson 3: Calculating dosing for several medications based on body weight of the patient.

Lesson 4: Apparently a quick way to test someone to see if they’re allergic to Penicillin is to just take the Penicillin/Lidocaine mixture you’re going give as an intramuscular injection and put a drop in their eye. I guess if they are allergic a red eye is better than a systemic allergic reaction, which might kill you in our clinic due to our lack of resources. This is also no bueno.

Lesson 5: Tonsils can get big. REAL big.

Lesson 6: After seeing never ending furious hoards of sick children how to subtly pick up on pathologic breath sounds. Looks like this rotation is going to make up for my poor pediatric rotation after all.

Lesson 7: I apparently have some kind of super human immune system because there is no reason why I shouldn’t be sick after I have been coughed on by so many sick children. Now how do I use this power to fight crime?…..

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