The OR

In my "free time" when I wasn't trying to build water filters, I would pop into the OR to see what was happening, sometimes I ended up doing some sort of assisting and always documenting...



An essential in any Nigerian hospital is some sort of insect killer. You just never know when a stream of ants is going to march through your surgical field or try to get into your sterilized instruments...









Here I don a super extra large set of scrubs donated by some Canadian hospital. I know I have lost weight recently but this makes me look like a poster child for Weight Watchers! I am with some of the visiting staff at Peace House hospital. They have volunteers that come on their days off from other jobs to help. The hospital is run completely by volunteers - no one gets paid a salary. I learned a lesson about living by faith...




To get into the OR, you have to change into sandals - yes, sandals. They do have a couple of pairs of rubber boots but those are reserved for those actually doing the surgery, and often they don't wear boots. A couple of patients had some major blood loss and I had to make sure nothing dripped onto my feet!







I'm sorry if surgical pictures make you sick to your stomach - this one isn't too bloody. It is a uterine fibroid. It was attached to the top of the uterus and several times the size of a uterus. In this case the uterus was saved, and hopefully the woman will be able to have children in the future.


I also watched a leg amputation (yakubu's), an appendectomy, and the most disturbing was a goiter removal. They don't have intubation at Peace House, so they use something called Ketamine which is a sedative. But not all people are completely sedated during surgery. One woman in particular did not "take well" to the ketamine and kept waking up and struggling during surgery. I had just stopped by to see how it was going and ended up coming into surgery to hold the woman's arms and legs down and trying to suction her mouth with a bulb syringe (no suction either) under a sterile field (I was in my everyday clothes), during the surgery. The woman was fine post-operatively despite her struggle and major blood loss.
I learned I never want surgery under minor sedation!
But I love watching surgery and seeing all the "parts" I only seen drawn in books. God was pretty imaginative when it came to designing the human body!