CHAD

So much has happened since my last blog. I've been at CHAD, a community health and development secondary hospital out in the rurals. That is the reason why I have not had a chance to update my blog. The computer there takes forever to start up. To get to a website would take 2 mins! So, here's a review of what happened this past week.

Monday:
Orientation at CHAD and learned about the history of CMC. It's a great story. So a brief synopsis would be a lady named Ida Scudder, who is a daughter of a medical missionary, was born in India. She is an American who one day witnessed the death of three pregnant women while in labor during one night near Vellore, because no female doctors were available to help with the deliveries. Ida's dad was a doctor but he was not able to assist because he was a male. So she went back to the U.S. and studied to become a doctor. She came back to Vellore and started a one room clinic at her house that eventually expanded into CMC hospital. She was a huge advocate of community health and traveling to villages to help people. So now CMC sees over 5,000 outpatients and 3,000 inpatients a day! This is a very brief discription of CMC's history but there's a more complete story online.

Tuesday:
Checked out the L&D, pediatrics, geriatrics, ICU, ER, and general wards at the CHAD hospital. I saw leprechaunism, a congenital syndrome, which I have not ever seen/heard of before. I have a great picture but until I figure out how to upload pictures onto this blog.....maybe later. So apparently there is a lot of consanguineous marriages within the villages and many autosomal recessive traits show up.

Wednesday:
Nurse's Run, where we do home visits. This was exhausting! We visited a total of about 16 homes and 6 villages. We walked to each house and did mostly prenatal and postnatal checkups. We saw some hypertensive individuals and a handful of well baby exams. Unfortunately, most of the babies were malnourished and one was a 2 months old term baby girl, but only weighed about 5 pounds! The mom was feeding her cow milk and the baby had diarrhea and just looked aweful! The nurse referred the baby to the hospital and supposedly there will be a van to pick the patient up the next day. Some of the houses were made out of sticks/cow dung and some were made out of concrete and bricks. There was a huge variety of living quarters. Some villages had a well!

Thursday:
Doctor's Run, where we travel in a mobile clinic and go to 4 different posts. The patients would arrive at the post and we would see patients either in the van or outside the van at a table set up. I loved this experience! So two doctors would run this. One doctor is outside at the table taking blood pressures and doing baby exams, hypertensive/diabetes checkups and some geriatrics/psychiatric conditions. Another doctor would be in the van doing prenatal checkups. The back part of the van were two nurses giving immunizations to the babies and dispensing medications. We left at 8:30am and didn't get back until 6pm!

Friday:
Today, was our day to recuperate! Wow, what an exhausting week! We went to a traveling agent to help us organize our trip for our last week in India. So far we have a train ticket to get to Bangalore and a plane ticket from Delhi back to Chennai on March 2nd to catch our flight back to Houston, home! Ro, my roommate back in San Antonio, is in Bangalore with her relatives so I'll get to see her finally!! Now, off to the ER at CMC hospital to explore some more.