Last night we had a farewell party for Dr. Reed and Dr.
Rich, two visiting doctors from DC. Most of the (off-duty) clinicians were
there, and we drank the last of the beer that Reed and Rich had bought for
their stay. Sometime during the shindig, someone received a call saying that a
couple of critical patients were one their way. This is rare at FAME because
usually critical patients simply arrive unannounced. (Yesterday we had a dead
patient brought into the outpatient clinic for treatment; I don’t know how they
got the body into the doctor’s office without the clinic staff noticing he was
deceased.) Anyway, nobody gave it much thought because often, “critical
patients” decide they might not come right after they call but instead wait for
morning.
After the official party, we headed into town to find a bar and send
the doctors off in proper fashion, but on the road to Karatu a white Land Rover
flew by in the opposite direction with flashing lights. Ambulances are very rare
in Northern Tanzania and typically mean something serious, so we turned around
and brought the doctors back to work.
It turned out that two American tourists on safari had been in a car
crash in transit from the Serengeti to Ngorongoro Crater. Dr. Reed pronounced
one in the ambulance and the other will need to be evacuated by air this
morning. Luckily the driver (who was wearing his seat belt) was unhurt. We
can’t afford to evacuate Tanzanians, not even to Dar Es Salaam. There are lots of
phone calls to be made when an American needs to be flown out (and when one
dies in Tanzania too) so it’s been a busy morning for everyone. I’ll go with
the patient to the airport, so that I can learn about the handoff procedure in
case I ever need to organize a medevac.
The lab at dawn:
Last night at the party, I told one of the local doctors
that the big thing I was afraid of in Tanzania was riding in a car. Karatu, a
town of 20,000 has only one paved road. All the other roads in the area are
dirt tracks, steep, frequently lopsided, washed out, filled with cattle, and
impassible in the rainy season. Tanzanians don’t really go in for speed limits
(difficult to enforce when most of the traffic police lack weapons or
vehicles), so instead they use speed bumps… everywhere. If you have kids, you
build speed bumps in front of your house and their school because otherwise
people will drive as fast as they can. The government also builds them. Most of
the speed bumps are made out of the same red dirt as the road, so you can’t see
them until you are almost on top of them.
There are also lots of pedestrians crossing the road, some
of them very young, some inebriated, some herding cattle, some all of the
above. The highway is full of heavy trucks moving at slow speeds and Land
Rovers swerving around them at high speed. In short, not a safe place.
To cap it all, people get around on motorcycle taxis (called
piki pikis) where you cling precariously to the driver’s back as you bounce
over the speed bumps. He has a helmet; you don’t. A friend of mine was very
distraught because she saw a man killed in front of her after he bounced off a
piki piki on the highway. Later in the week, one of our volunteer doctors found
the “dead” man very much alive in the government hospital. He shook
not-so-deceased’s hand and they took a picture together to show the friend who
saw the accident.
UPDATE: In my previous post, I asked for help with our EKG
machine, and I’ve gotten a lot of great advice and connections, including
someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who works at GE
Healthcare. I’ve submitted a full report on the issue directly to that person,
so hopefully we will see some progress there soon. It couldn’t come at a better
time because Dr. Reed left this morning, and we will now have to rely on
long-distance cardiology consults. Many thanks to everyone who helped out.
Bonus picture: Popi, the hospital's mascot. She's a Standard Tanzanian Dog. All dogs look about the same here, I suppose because there aren't any fences.
puppy!
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