After a fabulous trip through East Africa and Zanzibar (see some pictures below)...
Everyone at a village in Uganda
The central bus station in Kampala, Uganda
At the Equator (Uganda)
Eating lunch in shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro (you can sort of see it in the background)
Maasai women
Alita and I in a Maasai mud hut
Real life on the Serengeti
Can you see the leopard?
The endless herds of zebra and wildebeest
The Guineafowl that stole Cathy's lunch
Pumbaa!!
The end of the safari
Zanzibar!!
I started my Infectious Diseases training on July 1. (By the way, NEVER get sick the first week of July in North America - all the doctors are completely new and haven't the slightest idea what they're doing.) I finished my 3 years of general internal medicine and so I'm now sub-specializing in Infectious Diseases (what we like to affectionately call "ID"). I started in the microbiology lab and learned all about what happens to your pee after you put that little container in that little cupboard in the wall and what happens to that big Q-tip thing after the doctor sticks it down your throat etc etc. It was kind of fun.
August was spent on the "ID consult service" which means that anytime anyone has a question about an infectious disease in the hospital they call us for advice. It gets really busy (ie. I worked about 80 hour weeks that month). It's everything from someone who had surgery who now has a wound infection to malaria in someone who was travelling to someone with a new HIV diagnosis to someone on chemotherapy who has a weird fever and rash and all sorts of other things. It's really interesting but tires me out.
(I unfortunately have no pictures of these two months - except for a bunch of weird rashes/wounds that I took pictures of to teach my med students and I don't think I'll post that!!)
September I was on the Pediatric ID consult service. Very much the same as August, but with kids and somewhat less busy but no less stressful because although kids are much healthier than adults in general, a much greater proportion of their illness is due to infectious causes AND because it's really much harder to see sick kids.
The best part of that month though was my trip to Chicago. It was my birthday gift to myself because I really wanted to see my little nephew David (and Scott and Sue Ann of course hee hee). Dang is he ever cute. We toured around, shopped, saw some fish in the aquarium, ate good food and generally had a great time. I was only gone for 5 days but it was a nice break.
The end of September I rotated back into the microbiology lab but can't say much about that because highlights were instead a trip to San Diego for the IDSA conference (Infectious Diseases Society of America) where I presented a poster and went to some great talks AND got to visit Rachel and Scott McKeon and their kids Audrey and Jonny!! It was great to see them and I had a blast playing with the kids - they were nice enough to let me stay for Scott's birthday!
Later in the month I also got to go to another conference - Alberta Society of Infectious Diseases Conference (bit of a wind fall lately by way of conferences) in Banff at a very nice hotel. It was fun - we climbed up Sulphur Mountain with Esther and Abdu, two residents I worked with in Uganda, who are now here doing an exchange in Edmonton. It was pretty cold so we got to ride the gondola back down the mountain (it was free for those who climbed up - pretty good deal!!).
I'm now back on the adult ID consult service, this time at a different hospital - our "inner-city" hospital - at least as close as you get to inner-city in Edmonton (population ~1 million) and so am seeing lots of weird and wonderful stuff. I also got to go down to Calgary last weekend for my mom's birthday (I'm trying to help her with the cleaning incident to all the renovations my parents are doing) and luckily enough got to go to Ross Blaszczyk's mission farewell talk. That was really neat!
Whew!! That's really a long blog, if you lasted this long, you're amazing and you deserve to win a prize. I'll try and be better but my life is not as exciting as all my siblings/cousins lives seem to be (or at least I don't have any kids so I can't fill up my blog with cute pictures...maybe I should get a fish or something...)
Hmmm, have to think about that.
