A week on...

Spent last week in the surgery department at the hospital here. The operations are reasonably familiar, and techniques are based on the same surgery that I know from home (and that the surgeons learnt in various places abroad). The setting is quite different, and the availability of equipment is quite poor... no need for further details.

I suppose the hardest thing is always seeing people die in a way that I'd term 'unnecessary'...as subjective as that might be! I would expect to see that here, really. But the hardest thing on this trip has been those people who - by good fortune, money, or something - have made it to the tertiary referral centre for the whole country, they then spend loads and loads of money before dying. What a way to go unnecessarily - surrounded by trained healthcare professionals, drugs, equipment and a bankrupt family.

Plenty of patients of course dying that I wouldn't like to put in the unnecessary (or immediately unnecessary perhaps?) category... and there's loads of underlying reasons why surgical patients end up presenting way too late, or without money to pay for their operation, or can't access investigations or medications post-operatively. Hmmm.