Playing Doctor

Did you ever like to pretend to be a doctor when you were a child?  Well, I did.  Armed with my toy stethoscope and rolls of toilet paper "bandages," I set out to cure my teddy bears of all maladies and splint their "broken" stuffing-filled extremities.  My 5 year-old self didn't quite know what I was doing, but I was determined to do some good.

... 

Fast forward to now:  20 years later I'm a 4th year medical student (nearly intern) currently in rural northern Ghana volunteering at the Baptist Medical Centre for the month of April.  In many ways, this trip is the culmination of two years of planning and preparation, countless emails and conversations, with the threat of Ebola in West Africa ever looming in the background.  But we made it here.

And I can tell you that nothing could have fully prepared us for what you experience when you finally get here.  My first day at BMC, I felt like a first year (or worse even, a pre-med).  I was immediately asked to see patients on the pediatric ward on my own, and I froze.  I had never seen a case of typhoid fever, malaria, or marasmus, and so I (awkwardly) opted to observe instead.  Talk about a steep learning curve.  And to further handicap my painfully incomplete knowledge of tropical medicine, diagnostic testing is very limited here.  No electrolytes.  No EKGs.  And every other week it seems, no x-ray films or reagents for CBCs.  It's incredibly challenging to take care of patients when you often have no idea what exactly you are treating; and even if you do, the formulary is limited and drugs are frequently out of stock.  So we do our best.  

Then there's the oppressive 120 degree heat, the frequent power outages, and the travelers diarrhea that has plagued several of us already.  But when there is a child in front of you with eyes glazed over from fever, whose tiny body is limp with the burden of malaria and malnutrition, you forget about all of it.  The brain begins to process vitals and labs and poorly handwritten notes, while the hands move to examine the patient in patterns not quite yet committed to muscle memory.

Sometimes I still feel like I'm just playing doctor.  But then one of the nurses calls for a doctor, and I instinctively head over.