About....Well, Just about Everything!

Realised it's almost a week since I last posted....yep I've been very busy. Just today I mentioned to my mum, that if breathing wasn't an involuntary action, I don't think I would have had the time to breathe! The ward is just crazy (one of the interns said she feels like she's drowning!), but looking on the bright side, I've already completed a week, so just 3 more to go Insha Allah :) And there's so much to look forward to; sis is coming home tomorrow Insha Allah for a few days,                    

 Public holiday on Thursday and I'm not working,

Going to a pre-wedding function this weekend, braai + wedding + walimah next weekend. Woohoo:)

Anyway I was on call this Saturday, it was busy but Alhamdulillah it went well i.e. there was no resus, no deaths, I ate, managed to perform salaah on time and got 2hrs sleep:) There were some really sick kids though, it's so sad, and so many of them have been kinda abandoned by their mum's and their old grannies have to take care of them...I just don't understand!

Oh ja, you know I think it's an indigenous South African thing where they mix up the pronouns 'he' and 'she' and use 'she' when referring to males. Anyways I seem to be doing it the other way around (unintentionally though!) coz I often assume the kid's a male and ja, then the kid's actually a she! It was quite bad on Saturday with the one patient, coz I took the file from granny in the waiting area and went into the consultation room. They took a bit of a while in coming coz the kid needed the bathroom, so I decided to fill in all the papers. I had briefly seen the kid in the waiting room and thought he was a boy and the name seemed to confirm it, so I circled 'male' on all the papers and plotted the kid's weight and height on the boys growth chart. All through the history taking I kept saying 'he' and 'his' etc. I took the kid to the procedure room to do an ENT exam and noticed girl's shoes on 'his' feet, so I thought maybe 'he's' wearing 'his' sister's. Only when I saw the pink Barbie t-shirt under the jersey, I realised 'he' was a girl! It actually came out quite badly coz I just exclaimed "oh you're a girl?" After that I made sure I asked the parent beforehand, if the child was a boy or girl! Oh and I had to go scratch off everywhere I had male written and re-plot the graphs!

The same above-mentioned patient had this horrible productive cough and little through the history taking I saw the granny hand her a big Nola mayonnaise bottle - I was like huh? I was not impressed at all when I realised why she was given the bottle - she was uhm... collecting all her coughed-up sputum in it! Gross!!! So every time she coughed, she opened the bottle and... oh well you get the picture, I'm not going to go into details but I don't think I'l ever look at a mayonnaise bottle the same way again! 

Actually lots of the kids had nasty coughs and I actually ended up with a sore throat today after being coughed at yesterday. If I never had the TB bacilli in my lungs - highly unlikely, this is SA! - I definitely got them yesterday! I think I finally understood why a lot of the doctors say that at Edendale TB is personified - I really saw it 'walking around'!

To end off, my mum says such things at times! Recent conversation with an aunt....
Aunty: " Shame but Sabeehah has to work so hard. It's not easy for her huh? Shame she could have done something else..."
Mum: " Oh there's nothing shame about it, everything is hard! And Alhamdulillah she gets double reward, coz she'll get rewarded for helping sick people plus she gets rewarded at month end in her bank balance!"
Oh mother!!