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Annejemima
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Name: Anne
Birthday: 8/17/1982
Gender: Female
Interests: I'm definitely looking a banner ad that wants me to bust Santa's zit to get a free iPod. I wouldn't "bust Santa's zit" for a free ticket through residency.
And WTF?!...it's February! Shouldn't Santa be hibernating or something?
Expertise: Trivia...okay, maybe not. If we EVER win at James Joyce I'll be sure to claim it for real.
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
AIM:  Annejemima
Member Since:
1/14/2005
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| I matched in anesthesia at Duke!! I'm REALLY excited to be here for another 5 years, but of course a little sad to be putting off my triumphant return to the midwest for that much longer ;)
I close on my townhouse (72 Forest Oaks Dr.) on Thursday! It's nothing too special, but I love it and it's (soon to be) mine! About to have a mortgage AND a job. Ugh. ;)
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| Air miles: 18,978
Hours of travel time: 62
Flights changed due to delays: 2 (separately, and both on the way home, but I ended up at RDU only an hour later than planned and WITH my luggage - impressive!)
Days in SA: 30
Call nights: 6
Blood draws: 35
IVs placed: 24
ABGs drawn: 25 (do I REALLY have to do the phlebotomy part of the capstone course this month?)
Patients "sutured": 22 (individual lacerations: 35)
Foleys placed: 5
Times scrubbed in as 1st assist: 6 (enough for me, work in the surgical pit was more satisfying than theater)
Chest tubes placed: 4
Times CPR performed: 2
Intubations: 1
Needlesticks: 0!
Muggings/pickpocketings: 0!
Lessons learned: Lots!
Great restaurants "discovered": Lots!
Times lost while driving/navigating: Lots! (I don't think we made it anywhere, ever, without making at least one wrong turn)
Days outside of Johannesburg: 2.5 (didn't travel around the country much, but I can always come back!)
Lion bites: 1
Days spent biking around Soweto: 1
The bike tour is what Kate (a public health student who grew up in NC) and I did my last day in SA. It was AWESOME. There are bus tours of the township that just seemed too touristy for me, but this was perfect. We only biked through one of the nicer areas, Orlando West (where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu lived, on the same street, and where a lot of the fighting against Apartheid took place), but we still got to see plenty and learned a lot of the history in the 4 hours. The tour was led by a guy that grew up in the area - he's started his own backpackers' hostel and is the only black hostel owner in all of Southern Africa. His bike tours are famous in the area, and everyone in town knows him and his business. So I felt completely safe biking around with him, and we even left our bikes unattended at the stops we made. We stopped to drink the locally brewed beer (made from sorghum and corn meal) from a bucket with some old men in a Shebeen (a drinking hall [room] - four corrugated iron walls and a roof, with benches lining the walls), toured the "hostels" that the government built for the mining immigrant workers in the 50s (straight out of "Cry the Beloved Country") with a guy that lives in one of the rooms, met a traditional healer, drank more locally brewed beer (this second version was home brewed and served in the kitchen of the lady that made it) and then did the more touristy things like visiting the Hector Peterson memorial (a kid that was killed with many others during the Soweto Student protests in 1976) and Mandela's house. Overall, an awesome tour. It was nice to see some of the neighborhoods where my patients have come from. It would have been nice to have done it a little earlier in the month, but I think I might have been overwhelmed by it all, especially by crowds of people and the hostels. As it was, I was quite comfortable with everyone, having by now at least learned to distinguish between those Sowetans who are just minding their own business and those who are calculating whether they can get something from me. And it was wonderful to actually get to greet and talk to people on the street during the tour instead of riding past 8 feet above everything in a closed, air conditioned bus! So about 40 hours ago, I was biking the streets of Soweto, and today I was sitting in class at the med school, comfortably surrounded by many of my best friends. Funny how easy it is to get from one place to quite another.
The Shebeen, complete with buckets of beer (on the floor here), which looks disturbingly like pink dishwater, and tastes sour/bitter. But it's not bad! Kate was glad we got to drink before all these guys, but when the bucket came back around there was still beer in it, so we had another "round"! HAHA...it's not like our mouths are any cleaner than theirs.
The hostels - 10 were built for men, 1 for women, but families live in them now. Love the kids playing in the tree on the right.
Little kiddos outside the hostels
The only bikes in the neighborhood - also the only whites, of course. The kids kept coming up to us and shyly reaching to touch our arms, just to touch.
The most famous photo, of Hector Peterson being carried to the medics, from the Soweto Uprising of 1976
Aerial view of one of the zones in Orlando West. Lots of the streets are paved, and the houses are well built- not all of Soweto is like the hostel neighborhood. Winnie Mandela lives down the hill opposite the direction this photo was taken.
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| In preparation for my return, I just checked the Durham weather online for the first time since I left: 43 degrees and cloudy? Come on - whatever happened to beautiful March/Spring in NC? I swam outside in the sun this afternoon. Did I say I was coming back soon? Never mind! Just kidding - can't wait to see you all Sunday night/Monday morning, whether or not the weather improves (I know it will)! P.S. My last day of work was today: I survived a month at Bara without a needlestick (but I did see several happen)! And I'll comment on having survived a month in Jo'Burg without having anything stolen when I'm safely in Paris or at home. | | |
| It seems that sometime last year a group of men hired a truck, dressed up in workmens' clothes, drove to Jo'Burg General Hospital, loaded a CT scanner into said truck, and drove off with it. Because they looked official, no one even questioned them on the way out. This raises a few questions in my mind: how did they get the thing out the door? CT scanners are huge! The same way it came in, I guess - but it must have taken a long time to get it apart, and they must have really known what they were doing. It's not like you can just uplug it from the wall and wheel it out! And what did they do with it once they had it? Who would even know where to take a CT scanner to get a good price for it? Anyway, I assumed that it was because of stories like these that there are security guards checking people's trunks as they drive out the gates of Bara hospital. No one checks anything as you drive in (not even for guns and knives), but EVERY car/truck/van/whatever gets checked as it exits, every day. One the other day one marked "Caution - RADIOACTIVE" drove up next to us and the guard swung the doors wide open and stuck his head inside (my camera wasn't quite fast enough to capture that brilliant moment). We all have always thought they were checking for stolen supplies, files, CT scanners, etc. Finally today, after having our trunk searched yet again, we decided to ask, "So, what exactly are you looking for?" Without a moment of hesitation and with a straight face, the security guard replied, "You know, babies and things like that." Come again?! | | |
|  Jo’Burg is a fenced in city. Houses in the city and outside in the suburbs are on beautiful, tree-lined streets, but the view from inside is obscured by high concrete walls topped with razor wire. I mentioned that landscaping is big business here, and I think it’s primarily for the yards within those walls – perhaps a well-manicured lawn distracts from the fact that you can only see 10 feet outside your living room window. I’ve loved my month here, but being a permanent resident would be too much. Jo’Burgers’ (?) pattern of life is extremely dictated by security. In addition to their housing situation, the places they frequent reflects their need to feel contained: indoor malls are HUGELY popular. We went to a giant mall the first weekend I was here, and I thought, “wow, so this is THE MALL that people go to.” On a Sunday afternoon it was packed shoulder to shoulder. But it turns out there are malls of similar and larger size sprinkled all over the city, often only one or two kilometres apart. Streets lined with little shops are incredibly rare. We have found one street (7th St., in Melville) that’s got all kinds of restaurants and shops and is quite safe (although our friend Andy did get his wallet stolen out of his pocket there the night before he left to go back to the UK), so we go there for dinner quite often. Anyway, everyone I’ve talked to agrees that for a month, the fenced in feeling isn’t really an issue – there are so many different fenced in places to explore that we don’t really feel confined. But if a person lived here for a while and established a few favourite places to go, I think it would be hard not to be a little claustrophobic. So the above picture sums it up, I think. This is a beautiful place with fantastic weather, but most of the time whatever you’re looking at is from inside a vehicle or through a fence. P.S. It appears that we've run South Africa's supplier of bottles for chest tubes out of supply. Baragwanath is currently having to get them from other hospitals in the area. I bet this has never happened in the states! | | |
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