Elmina Clinic

Hello everyone. Thank you for your comments!
Chris has been doing most of the blog. I think it looks really great. I have mostly been at the clinic when he was able to work on it and only just saw much of it today. The only correction I must make is that there was no actual beating of the children at the clinic: the nurse would just brandish a stick if the kids were not behaving. The children were well behaved!!
The clinic was a busy health center that provided prenatal care, family planning, uncomplicated OB/GYN and walk-in care. I was the only physician working in the walk-in section. They did have community medical examiners and midwives. We treated all kinds of illness and injury. There was certainly no patient privacy. In fact, often a neighboring patient would help interpret. There was also no equipment--like gloves, suture or sheets. There was medicine. You send the patients to the dispensary to get their medicine after you see them. They frequently ran out of medicines. Every patient expects to get several prescriptions (Tylenol counts and requires a prescription). In the poor town where we lived about 60% of the population was illiterate so communication was hard.
We saw tons of malaria - tons and tons. There were a lot of wounds and cellulitis. There was quite a bit of Typhoid, too. (Note: we are vaccinated for typhoid and taking preventative medicine for malaria). We treated a lot of people for worms, but didn't I didn't get to see any. We referred anyone who was sick or needed more tests than we could perform--like an x-ray. It was not clear to me how easily our referrals were seen since the medical center was in the next town. We could do about 5 tests--u/a, urine pregnancy, hemoglobin, malaria smear, typhoid test, glucose. That's it.
I was struck by how muscular all of the people were and some of the impossibly beautiful figures. There would be a young woman with a body better than Beyonce' selling bananas on her head on the side of the street. Michelle, the Canadian medical student who stayed with us asked me to look at this abdominal wall "mass". It turned out to be a very well defined abdominal muscle--the first pack of incredible 6-pack abs. I guess that is not frequently seen in the doughy Canadian population.
I didn't see any psychiatric patients, no one who drank or smoked or used drugs. There were no drug seekers as we didn't even have any narcotics. Not one patient complained despite long waits and little to offer.
Now I face two months of not practicing medicine. That will be the longest I have gone in 20 years! Yippie!