This week

It has been an interesting week in the hospital... but first I got some downtime on one of the local islands.  Remind me to tell you about it sometime.  In three words: It was fantastic!!  I'm glad I went.  I'm also glad I chose to hibernate for 24hours after.  Barely left the room except to grab food.  It may sound weird, but I think it was a great balance of social and non-social, sun and shade.  All of which helped to rejuvinate me and get me ready for this week, fully rested.
I told you before that I have the joy of running the General ward, right?  General surgery (at least here) is dominated by hernia and lypoma surgeries.  After Christmas we'll add goiters to that list.  Most people look at that short list and think they'll get bored, or not be challenged.  I almost thought that.  And then I remembered that with it's high turn-overs, General often gets the overflow from other wards.   That is exactly what we are enjoying right now.  For two weeks we went without any general surgeons and got to take in extra maxillo-facial and plastic surgery patients.  Now that we're doing general surgery again, we have less of the overflow (only about 6 or so), and a whole lot more general...
And then some machinery started having problems.  And the person who fixes them is sick.  So only some surgeries are happening.  But thanks to circumstances, general surgeries are some of the ones we can most easily do this week.  Thanks to low staffing, I can't take more than the normal number of general patients... so in a rare event, our general patients are overflowing onto the max-facs ward.  Yup, those nurses used to the head/neck/face surgeries... are getting the joys of general patients.  It's all about being flexible! 
For the moment, I must ask for prayer.  Prayer for the many, many people getting sick on this ship right now (there are two bugs going around, neither one is very fun.).  And prayer that good long-term solutions would be found for the broken equipment.  I know God's got a plan here.
In the meantime, we I've also had the joy of spending time with some of the ortho kids (having their legs straightened), and one that went for cast changes was so much FUN to watch when she came back!  She had gone from very restrictive casts (spica) to long leg casts.  Between her and her grandma, the smiles were endless.  I love seeing people so excited!  And one little boy who has been in the hospital for 1 month now came to us knowing very little french and no english.  Now he can very easily get his point across, knows a lot of english and is copying down whole english books word for word on any scrap paper he can find.  Today he was calling "fotay", which means "white person"... and I suddenly realized he had forgotten my name and was calling me.  So I proceeded to re-teach him my name...  I'm once again introducing myself as "Heada"  because they learn it faster.  
Anyways I should head to bed.