ObGyn at SRRH

My first day on the Obstetrics and Gynecology wards – what a surprise! The consultants actually came to round on the patients on weekends, in contrast to Mulago, where consultants came to round on the patients once in a blue moon coinciding with an eclipse. Halfway through rounds, an emergency c-section secondary to fetal distress presented itself. So I went with one of the interns, Dr. Opero, to theatre. On the way, he asked me whether I’ve ever been to theatre, whether I’ve ever scrubbed, whether I’ve ever assisted on a c-section, etc. “Yes. I’m basically done with medical school. Of course I’ve been to theatre,” I exclaimed. “Well, I don’t know, some people go through medical school without having been in theatre,” he replied. My goodness, what kind of medical school graduates students who have never been in theatre? Such ridiculous claims shall not be tolerated.

When we got to the operating table, I was in for a surprise. There was no iodine available, so we cleaned the abdominal wall with normal saline. We did a SUMI instead of a pfannenstiel incision. We wiped the blood up with a “mop”. And when the mop was soaked through with blood, I tried to get the other clean mop, but was stopped by Dr. Opera. “No, no. I’m saving that for cleaning the abdominal cavity later.” And he wrung the blood-soaked mop until it was dry, and re-used it. Over the course of the surgery, we wrung the mop about 10 times, so that our gloves were sticky with dried blood. It definitely took some getting-used-to. And at the end of the case, they wash the mops, sterilize them, and reuse them over and over again. I was horrified by the resource scarcity. I told them that we use many many laps per case, so many that we have to do a lap count after each case. And we throw the laps away after use. They were horrified by the resource wastefulness.