Meandering Mazes

June 24 2011

This week has flown by!  Everyone is gearing up to go back to America the start of July as I get ready to move to the rural rotation.  I’m getting excited to finally leave the noise, heat, and stink of Mumbai. 

My favorite drink in India,

pure sugar mango juice!

On Thursday night during clinic our doctor needed to make a house visit.  It was around 9pm and we had been with him since 6 but we decided to tag along.  It was a pretty slumy part of town and we had to weave down an ally then down progressively smaller passages until I was hunched over in a tunnel-like path wide enough for one person.  When we arrived at the house the lady was laying on the bed half comatose.  She had a large cut on her foot from where she had stepped on a nail and it had become horribly infected.  She was also overweight and had diabetes.  We checked her blood sugar and it was over 500.  You could also see the red-marked infection had started to climb up her ankle.  The reason her blood sugar was so high was because she had stopped eating for three days, and because of that, thought she didn’t need to take her insulin.  Our doctor was very upset she had waited so long to call.  He decided she needed to be checked into the hospital pronto with IV antibiotics.  The doctor seemed to be one of the better doctors we’ve rotated with so far.

This doctor gave placebo injections to make the patients
feel like they were getting treated.  He said without the injections
the patients would go to another doctor.  That's just good business.

This weekend two of the girls in our group wanted to take another mini-vacation from our hostel so they are planning on staying in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel (which is super fancy).  I plan to mooch Internet, TV and good AC.  On Saturday the other girl talked me into accompanying her to a set of famous caves about 5 hours out of Mumbai.  I really want to get the full India experience and see as much of the country as possible.  Hopefully it is as amazing as the brochures say.