one week down

Today is day 8 of our trip. I cannot believe how quickly the time is passing. Right now we are getting ready for a hike up Mt. Mulanje. We are leaving here at 9am, and will hike all day to a plateau and then camp out there tonight and then continue to hike on Sunday. We are all very excited and the hike is supposed to be beautiful. We will each carry a small day pack that will have water and a poncho, and then we will hire 4 porters to carry our dinner, sleeping bags, clothes and some extra stuff. It should be fun!

Well week one was a very interesting week at the hospital. It is still so amazing to me the variety of cases that we see in the wards. There is an ICU here, but there are no other special units. Yesterday we rounded on about 30 people in the womens ward, 2 of which had Brown-Séquard syndrome, something I had only read about before, two had heart failure, one had breast cancer, one had malignant melanoma (the melanoma was the size of half of the sole of her foot), several had TB and several had HIV related pneumonias and other diseases. The registrar that was rounding with us is from the London and she has been here for a month and said that in one month she has been amazed with the type of pathology that she has seen here. One Monday I will be going the the HIV clinic with her. Terrie told us this past week that the life expectancy here is 38 years old! That is primarily due to HIV, which I think is just shocking.
This past Thursday several of is watched as Terrie and her team did an autopsy on a 2 year old child that had just passed away due to complications from malaria. It was sad, but very interesting. I had never before seen an autopsy, and because this autopsy was being done for research purposes it was interesting to see the different things that they were specifically examining.
I will write more later