Steph and I came to work Wednesday and discovered that our Rwandan colleagues had finished all 105 students the day before as we suffered from slight GI distress. It was nice to arrive at work and realize that we could go back to the million things we had planned for our respective units. One of these is a joint effort in educating my nurses more about pediatrics. We currently do not have a pediatric ICU here in Butare so my unit gets all the little patients. At one point, I had no adult patients and all pediatric patients. Definitely not my area of expertise. Fortunately, it is Steph's.
Together we are developing a pediatric reference manual for my staff. We are also hoping that Steph and our other pediatric nurse, Veronica, will be able to give some lectures. Our final project is developing a Broselow tape for the ICU. I had never heard of a Broselow tape until this week. Essentially it's a massive measuring tape that can only be used on pediatric patients. You measure the length of the patient and this tape, gives you a weight for the patient and then dosing for emergency medications. All pediatric medications are weight based versus in adults where only some are. Seeing how we don't readily have scales here, the physicians are often guesstimating weights. From what I've seen, my ICU doctors are pretty good at this, but the tape is easy to use and may prove to be an interesting study. Steph wants to compare what the doctors guesstimate, what the tape says the patients weight is, and what the patient's actual weight is.
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| Arts and crafts time with Steph! |
It's been a lot of fun collaborating with Steph. Sometimes here we all get so involved in our work and our units that you don't realize how alone you are. Having projects together is just so nice and refreshing.
Also this past week, my twin, Emmanuel presented his first PowerPoint presentation to the staff. He presented the clinical audit data from the month of October. It went really well! The staff was very engaged and asking lots of questions. Partially because they were upset they didn't meet all the goals we had set, but also because they could just ask Emmanuel very easily in Kinyarwanda and I was there to clarify if need be.
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| Emmanuel and staff |
The staff met one of our three goals for October, but ironically, they met the goal that I thought was going to be the hardest. We will continue to work at the goals we didn't meet and see how we do. I think Emmanuel and I were able to explain and clarify questions the staff had, so fingers crossed, we will see more improvement this month.
But despite not meeting all the goals, I am rewarding the staff with treats this week. Today I made 7 loaves of banana bread. We saved one for us, but the idea is to bring a loaf for each shift this week, which means I have four more to make.
I love to cook and over the past few years since I finished grad school I've really been able to take the time to cook. Julie and Vanessa informed me that they are sorely disappointed that I haven't cooked some good brunch recently... Particularly the bacon and Nutella stuffed French toast. But last night I made tomato soup from scratch, which I had never done.
Now anyone who knows me, knows that I am quite the sucker for tomato soup. It's absolutely one of my favorites. I ate dinner at Stacey & Jeff's earlier in the week and absolutely loved the soup Stacey had made so she sent me the recipe. I experimented a little with it because it's hard to find good cream here, so I made it with fermented milk. And it worked! It turned out to be this creamy tomato soup that was absolutely delicious.
And of course, I made grilled cheese to go with it.
I've learned to stop doing so much work on the weekends and to actually enjoy myself. Prior to cooking I spent some time in the garden with our guard, Vénuste picking a ton of green beans that he planted. I washed them off and made nice little packet of beans and avocados from the garden for both Vénuste and Charles (our other guard) to take home. I had music blaring, laundry going, the kitchen was a mess and I cooked up a storm. It was such a good day yesterday. Today too! I worked out, baked, and read some of my latest novel.
I got a mini lecture from Becky, a mental health nurse (who ironically taught my sister, Nora at Montana State) the other week about taking better care of myself. So I've also decided to take a weekend away from Rwanda and Africa for that matter and go to Italy for 72 hours. I'm going in two weeks time to visit my friend Tim who is stationed there with the US Navy. Tim and I met two years ago on a ferry from Croatia to Italy and he will be stationed back in Newport come the new year. I was talking with him and he mentioned how it sounded as though I'd been having a rough month. I certainly had been. So he invited me to visit and so I'm going to! I'm already dreaming of pizza in Naples. Can't wait. Since Naples isn't my favorite place in Italy we might drive down the Amalfi Coast, but in all honesty, I don't care. I just need to recharge my batteries!
But overall, things are going well here. I'm enjoying it as frustrating as it can be at times and am really glad I've had this opportunity. I am one of the luckiest women in the world with the support I am continually getting from my friends and family and my crew here. Thank you.
Lesson Learned: Working all the time because there isn't much else to do in town isn't always the best idea. Mental health care is uber important.
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