Following a long couple of days of traveling, we finally arrived in Tanta around 10 pm last night. We are staying at the Panorama hotel in Tanta which is very comfortable. Typical of a nice hotel, clocks with the current time in various international cities are displayed behind the front desk. It is currently the same time in New York as London, though you get the point. They do in fact have wi-fi which makes this blogging much easier.
Our group is complete and our IVU group, me and Dr. Angel, are joined by Surgical Volunteers International run by Tom Flood. SVI largely focuses on craniofacial defects and there are two pediatric craniofacial surgeons in our group. To coordinate all the surgical activities we have a pediatrician, two peds anesthesiologists, an anesthesia resident, a peds anesthesia fellow, two OR nurses, three recovery nurses, and some additional support staff. It takes a while for our group to get moving and to compound the issue we never go anywhere without a police escort.
Today we had our clinic to screen and prioritize patients for the upcoming week of surgery. We will be working at the American Mission Hospital in Tanta. The hospital was founded in the early 20th century and is devoted to treating citizens of Tanta and the surrounding communities. Since the last trip here one year ago, the medical staff, including the pediatricians and surgery residents, have been keeping a running list of patients to see. In addition, word that we are coming has spread and a number of patients just show-up at the clinic.
Dr Angel and I saw approximately 45 patients today of which close to 40 are scheduled for surgery. We saw a lot of hypospadias with about have of these patients presenting with urethrocutaneous fistulae following repair. I got a little frustrated with the lack of any medical records for the patients. We saw one kid with a pfannensteil incision scar, non-palpable testes, and a somewhat repaired proximal hypospadias (i.e intersex until proven otherwise). Mom thinks her kid has testes and the surgery was an attempted orchiopexy. We’re going to take a look and see what we find. This is just an example of how you make do and treat the patients as well as you can in the given situation. Our last patient of the day was a bed wetter; the only bed wetter I've ever been glad to see.
Anyway, we have tonight on our own though can’t go anywhere without our guards. Maybe we will check out the views from the rooftop bar of the panorama hotel. Tomorrow we have a day off and most of us are going to check out Alexandria for the day.
Later,
Chip
Uploading pics is going really slow, i'll try to work on it later.
~Croth
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