Sufficient Grace: Clinicals in Zambia!

***I wrote this post last week...but haven't been able to post it because of lack of internet!

We are currently back in Choma. We were in Zimba from Sept. 14-28 and now are in Choma for the next three weeks! This post will hopefully give you a little bit of an idea of what we have been doing!

Clinicals have started off with a bang here in Zambia! We are only 3.5 weeks in and

I already have almost half of the 210 required hours done. That is a great feeling!

While in Choma, our clinicals were spent at Choma General Hospital. It is about a 10 minute drive from where we are staying.

Chrissy and I excited for our first day of clinical!

This is the day Maggie and I were in the Female Med/Surg ward. She was obviously really excited about this. We were sitting in the nurses station (a glorified closet) because there wasn't a whole lot to do after a couple hours.
There doesn't seem to be alot of patient interaction with the nurses here. Each patient has "bedsiders" who are usually family members and they do the majority of patient care. I did get to put in an IV this day!

Jamaica and I spent one of our clinical days in the ART counseling clinic. (Anti-retroviral therapy is what treats people who are HIV-positive) This is the counselor, Precious, and I.

It was a slow day so we talked to a counselor named Josh for a couple hours and even got HIV tested! These are our cards proving our HIV negative status. :)

Josh and I

We only had one week of clinical in Choma so I am excited to be able to go back next week!

We are currently in Zimba and are working at the Zimba Mission Hospital. It is affiliated with the Wesleyan church so the compound we are staying at is right down the road. We walk everywhere we go here!

There are two missionary doctors working here so I definitely think they have helped westernize the hospital some. We don't feel like we are constantly out of supplies and things are a little more organized and nicer at this hospital.

A beautiful tree on the hospital's campus. I love all the beautiful flowers here!

Lauren and I were in surgery together on our first clincal day in Zimba. They call it the Operation Theater here. We took lots of pictures of ourselves during various stages of our day.

Excited for surgery!

These were the shoes they had for us to wear during surgery. They were so random!

After we got all our surgical garb in, we realized that the OR (operating room) was not air-conditioned with no air circulation whatsoever. The OR in the US is usually freezing cold so we we thought it would at least be somewhat cooler in there. I felt like I was dressed for winter in that 100 degree heat!

We got to see a D&C, a lipoma removal, a foreign body removal from a hand, and the removal of a needle from a wrist. They were all very interesting! I got to scrub in for one of the surgeries and we were able to be very involved!

It is so interesting how involved we were able to be with all the surgeries. In the US I hardly could even see the patient in most of the surgeries because of all the people and equipment in the room. Here in Zambia, we were the only nurses in the room with the surgeon!

Another thing I have really noticed is the lack of patient privacy. The door to the hallway was open the whole time until Lauren and I closed it (except for it didn't latch well..probably why the didn't even try)

Zambians are very stoic when it comes to pain so they really don't use much pain medication at all. I was very thankful when the doctor at least used Lidocaine for the last couple surgeries! They may not show that they're in pain but there is no way they weren't hurting!

Lauren and I moved into the lab that afternoon. We had to put on these masks because we were testing for TB.

The fix their slides by dousing gauze in alcohol and lighting it on fire! They are very inventive!

The lab got a little slow so obviously our masks became Yamakas. Is that inappropriate?

We helped look at slides for Malaria

This is the Peds ward I was in one of my days of clinical. I DO NOT want to be a Peds nurse. It's bad enough at home...it's even worse here when you can't even speak their language!

The next day I was following around an American resident named Gretchen. I was lucky enough that she was working the maternity ward! We had two babies born that afternoon.