Day 19

Day 19

April 29, 10:04 pm, Vellore
Yeah, you can probably tell that I fell asleep again last night while I was writing. I was so exhausted. I erased the last line of jibbrish that I had typed in my sleep. It always cracks me up to read the stuff I write as I'm dozing off to sleep. I think I had said something about seeing a lot of potential and then something about a room and I don't know... didn't make any sense.

I don't feel much like writing tonight, so I think this will be somewhat brief. I'm tired. Things have been going pretty well though. Dermatology is good. It's been pretty interesting and they are pretty friendly and helpful about explaining things and teaching us. I really like Anisha, she's nice and helpful. Maam (as they call the female attending) is also great. She is very kind and also makes sure to include us in her instruction. We've already seen a lot of crazy cases! It seems that people don't come to the doctor for a long time here, so when they finally present, they have rather severe cases. I saw a case of leprosy yesterday and we've seen a number of bad cases of pemphigus. I've also seen some psoriasis, lots of tinea, moluscum contagiosum, melasma, HSV-1, cutaneous amyloidosis, tinea versicolor, candida, scleroderma... just lots and lots of interesting things. Dermatology is a good rotation to do here because even if you can't understand what they are talking about with the patient, you can always see what is going on with the skin. It makes outpatient clinic a lot more interesting than some of the other things we've rotated through.

Yesterday I watched Anisha do a couple of biopsies, one of them on the bad pemphigus patient that was admitted yesterday. Today we had rounds and then procedures in the morning and into the afternoon. Anisha let me do cryotherapy on one of the warts on a patient's foot. We also injected a keloid scar. I watched a removal of a mole on the face of a young lady and then later we watched a hair transplant. That was very interesting. This young man had viteligo, which caused a white patch of skin and hair just above his forehead. So they took a bunch of plugs of hair from the back of his head and then transplanted them into that patch and apparently the pigment from the hair follicles will get taken up and take care of the white patch. Interesting. It was fun to watch.

Tonight dinner kicked my butt. Seriously. I got the chicken biryani from the canteen here at the hospital and it was so flaming hot I could not stand it. I couldn't even eat half of it, it just hurt too much. I felt like everyone in there was watching me, the poor white boy who couldn't take the heat. Probably they really weren't, but it sure felt like it. I felt bad leaving so much food sitting there, but I really just could not bear it. It was sad, because I thought that I was doing better with the spicy foods. I still think I've improved, but I guess I'm not Indian yet.

Not much else going on. I've been trying to plan out my trip after the rotation ends this week. I guess I'm going to be traveling on my own for a while, and I'm still trying to figure out what that means. I don't know if I should change my itinerary because I'm going to be alone or what. I wasn't really that worried about it, but certain family members (probably all of them, I just haven't talked to them all yet) think that I'm going to die if I travel by myself. Hmmmm.

Okay, I'm tired of thinking about it so I'm going home to read Eldest and forget about it for now.

day 19 photos