Bangladesh Day 2

Day 2 in Bangladesh is a surgery day. I woke up and had breakfast with Dr. Das and Dr. Ganesh. Then I packed up some of my supplies and headed to the operating rooms. As a side note...Differences in culture are always interesting. We had to take off our shoes to go into the ORs. The shoes they had there were flip flops. Luckily, I found a pair of clogs. They had two OR rooms. The schedule was cleared out just for us. We were able to do our big cases in the main room and smaller cases in the other. They had one cystoscope set that Dr. Das had donated the last time he was here but no camera. They had a decent stock of supplies which Dr. Bowers said was all donated. They still lacked several things like new light bulbs for the cystoscope, good tape, and they really need decent surgical instruments. We did a hypospadias repair with instruments that that would shock our pediatric urologist, Dr. Joyner. We had 5 cases today. I scrubbed in for a redo urethroplasty and an adult hypospadias with Dr. Ganesh. Dr. Das worked on 2 UC fistulas and a cysto on our epispadias patient for tomorrow. The OR staff are really nice except I keep getting the wrong instruments when I ask. I think I don’t speak up enough in the OR. I’ve been working really hard on saving suture. Dr. Koyle and Dr. Joyner would be proud of me. At the end of the day, we walked out of the operating room to find 2 young men waiting for us. They were patients of Dr. Ganesh who heard he was in Bangladesh and wanted to come see him. They came all the way from Dhaka just to catch a few minutes with him. The patient was a young orphan who had a urethral stricture from a pelvic injury. It was operated in Bangladesh and restructured then Dr. Ganesh operated on him. I was able to use my new bladder scanner to check his PVR. I thought that was cool. He had <50cc. We wrapped up our day by meeting four new friends. We have new roommates at the guest house, Mitch and his family. The family is American but has lived in Bangladesh in the last 7 years. They have two kids both born here in LAMB. His daughters are beautiful and ran around the house with a lot of energy speaking both English and Bangla. I’m going to bed early because we have big day tomorrow. Good night.

~Jhtamola