What is this? This is a blog post!

Today we had a pleasantly slow start due to a torrential downpour.  We arrived at the hospital around 10:30am and the delivery room was calm and nearly empty, there were plenty of supplies and there was a clipboard holding the charts of the women present!  Alix successfully started an IV (2 for 2) and attended a perfect mutlip birth of a healthy baby girl born to a healthy mum. We augmented a woman with ruptured membranes, prepared a woman for cesearean and observed as Mickey managed two miscarriages- one with misoprostol and the other D&C (2 prior doses of misoprostol had been unsuccessful). Finally, Carolyn attended a very precipitous birth- the mom progressed from 4cm to birth in 10 minutes! Thankfully both mom and baby were fine, though mom's bleeding was a little worrisome so Carolyn gave misoprostol. Normally, IV oxytocin would be the medicine to start with, but since IVs are in such short supply and the bleeding was slow this was a better use of resources.

Cathy and Mickey treated Prossy, Carolyn and I to a lovely dinner at the Danish NGO. Nancy, a nursing instructor from UBC who is here finding placements for nursing students for 2012, joins us in Masaka tonight and has brought us peanut butter and bug spray. Just in the nick of time too-we ran out of peanut butter and Bailey's this morning. While Bailey's is a luxery we can live without peanut butter is an essential!

We are finally getting used to a unique figure of speech here. Ugandan's will tell you something by stating a question and then answering their own question. E.g. "What are we learning today? We are learning the partograph. What do we chart on the partograph? We chart the contractions." Whenever this happens we are puzzled as we feel we are expected to answer the question but you haven't a clue. Alix mastered it this evening when visiting the Masaka Hospital staff accomodation. She said, "This is the accomodation for who? The staff of  the hospital."  Carolyn in particular has mastered the Ugandan way of speaking, with pauses and figures of speech, as evidenced by her role playing a Ugandan midwife while Alix practiced her MVA interviewing.

The first birth of the day,  Alix (in her new uniform), Cathy

Carolyn and the mother who laboured in 10 min