Day 1 Hospital Notes

Today was a rather fun and full day, my first in the hospital. Here's some brief notes:

- As you can see from the picture, I did my first thoracentesis (I took fluid off a patient's lung). Watched one, then did one. My patient likely has a new diagnosis of TB and completely whited out his right lung on chest X-ray.

-Saw an interesting rash, pictured above. It started in July, initially treated somewhere else with ketoconazole and steroids with partial response (but also reported noncompliance). We weren't really sure what we thought it was (sounds like a Dr. Burday consult), but decided to do steroids and erythromycin cream.
-Met my ward--the medicine ward. I will shadow this week, but next week half of it becomes mine.
-They have a reasonable array of lab tests available to us (way more than I had in Africa) including: CBC, K, Crt, Hepatitis B Surface Antigen, HIV, AFB, fluid analysis, sed rate, UA, cholesterol, AST, glucose
-Encouraged that in 1 day with patients, I couldn't speak very well, but I could understand reasonably well (particularly if I asked, "Yu tok isi isi plis."--Please talk slowly)