Welcome to The South Coast, where the playas play.

For the second week, Andy and I headed to the South Coast to a small town called Scottburgh. We spent our days at a hospital called GJ Crookes. We met the COOLEST doctors at GJ, and I spent most of the days with a young shaven-headed Indian doctor called Civa. Similar to week 1, Monday was maternity day. I seriously spent like the first 2 and a half hours of Monday getting lectured on the ins and outs of delivery, complications, drugs and dosages, monitoring and management, filling out a solid 5 pages of notes! With the threats of a test looming, I made it my goal to learn the uses and dosages of the 8 drugs he told me about, and the different conditions and tests during labor and within a few days was able to confidently answer Civas questions while on rounds. Monday night we found a local bar and somehow got talked into going on an open-water shark jump on Wednesday! Good times! I spent Tuesday in ER with a doctor named Lilly and saw some interesting TB meningitis and AIDS-related illnesses. Also, some guy showed up threatening Civa, but he wasn’t there and then had to have a guard shadow him the next day! The other doctors were ruthless, teasing him for being paranoid. Long story. On Wednesday I went in to observe my first surgery, an above-knee amputation of a gangrenous diabetic. It smelled SO BAD. It sucked, but in retrospect it was probably a good idea to get one of the worst ones out of the way first. I learned so much from it, the surgeon was a wizard and cut and tied with such dexterity that it made my head kind of spin. The whole ordeal took an hour and a half, but it seemed to go much faster. Later that evening we got to speak with an elderly lady who escaped Zimbabwe and actually met Robert Mugabe! She told us how squads were taking over the farmers lands and how she took a bus out of the country and how it had wooden seats and she got sick from it. She also showed us a $50 billion Zimbabwean dollar note and how it was worth 2 rands (roughly 20 cents American). We also went surfing and boogeyboarding. Good times all around. Thursday was uneventful, I was sick most of the day, most likely due to starting taking the anti-malaria drug Malarone. After work, we went back to Durban to prepare for the upcoming Safari weekend in St. Lucia…….