Today we got up and went to Black Lion, the city and country's public hospital. It has 1000 beds, 100+ surgical residents, and 100 pediatric beds. It is staffed by who knows how many physicians, nurses, and residents. It educates the Addis Ababa University medical students at 300 a class although it sounds like they have a relatively high attrition rate. They also started a urology residency 3 years ago where they do 2 years of general surgery followed by 3 years of urology.
First stop was the operating room lounge to meet and greet. The surgical cases were supposed to begin at 8 am, but at 915 all of the surgeons were still taking their coffee and tea, eating big bird seed (see below) and "fasting" weird red stripe-y bread, and chilling. At 930ish and I say ish because it might have been even later something magically happened (maybe a bell I couldn't hear) and they all simultaneously got up and left.
An aside: Today is the day that I saw/ met my first overweight Ethiopians. Of course they were the doctors. Not all of them, only a few. I immediately thought of Chicken Hut.
When they got up we followed Dr. B to the wards on the 7th floor to make rounds. The pediatric rooms each held anywhere from 16 to 4 patients with all sorts of pathology (read as extreme badness in many different body parts). There were several urology patients, many bowel issues, neck masses, facial and tongue masses, many other cancers, and one 8 year old girl whose throat was cut practically in two by some unknown assailant. Their parents were all at bedside standing, sitting or laying on the flattened cardboard boxes that act as makeshift beds. The floor is also home to the only hospital playroom in Horn of Africa given by Healing the Children several years ago. This year they are giving recliners and couches in the rooms for the parents to sleep on. At one point while rounding looking out of the window on the ward one of my colleagues said, "Wow! What's that building over there? It's really nice." Of course it was our hotel.
For some unknown reason we skipped the pediatric ICU and went on to the Neonatal intensive care unit which was more modern and recently donated by the Turkish government. At first I was amazed that there were so many twins but it turns out that the smallest babies share cribs. The youngest babies that survive in Addis are 28 weeks.
Every moment I get a clearer picture of how poor this country is. Africans are the poorest in the world and Ethiopia is the poorest of the Africans making on average 25 bir a day which is about $1.40. Their hospital bills are extremely large considering a yearly income of $511. The average hospital stay at Black Lion costs between 10K- 15K for these children.
Next stop: Cure Hospital, a pediatric orthopedic hospital that allows HTC to operate there. Cure is San Diego open air beautiful. We got there at lunch time and ate the staff meal of Ethiopian food (the beets were amazing). We saw several patients here and booked 5 procedures for Wednesday.
Then off to Bethel we went, twisting and turning. I am relatively certain that 70% of our drive wasn't on actual roads. This is when I started looking for road signs. No dice, but if it is not a road maybe that is ok?? I started looking for stoplights. I saw 3. None of them working.
On our way to Bethel we saw our first houses (apparently it is in the newer rich muslim area of the city). I also noticed that almost all the slums have satellites. Bethel is a new adult hospital built in 2004, that has an MRI (the first in Ethiopia), a dialysis unit (also the first in Ethiopia and founded by a guy that was on one of the planes in 9-11) where they treat acute renal failure (there is no money for chronic disease), a medical school that accepts 30 students a year and graduates its first class in 2014. It is an Eco-hospital with its own power lines and water. They reclaim sewage to make natural gas which they harvest and use and also sell. They have high hopes for the near future: a PET scan, a cancer and radiation center, a vascular surgeon, and permission to draw and evaluate Tacrolimus levels so they can begin performing renal transplants to name a few.
On the way home we experienced Ethiopian rush hour, learned that if you hear a honk directly behind you while walking it means if you don't move you are going to get hit, had a lady throw trash in our van when we wouldn't give her money, and found a working stop light that the police officer directing traffic was totally ignoring.
Dinner: 13-1 Korean. Really folks??? really?? Bim! Bim! Bap! The Crowd wins again (It was super delicious though).
Pics: big seeds in the lounge
The or schedule
The wards
The operating room (or)
Nicu
Cure
Lunch
View from the hospital
Not a road but very close to one
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