i love being here

yesterday afternoon dr. pemba popped into my classroom and announced: i've found the body.

this was excellent news and at the end of the day we trooped over to the hospital morgue to learn how to do a saphenous vein cut down--a technique developed by american trauma surgeons in vietnam to save men who were bleeding to death, that also works really well for women with massive postpartum hemorrhage. essentially, when you can't find a vein to get a needle into, you can make an incision above the ankle, pull out the saphenous vein, cut it open and shove some IV tubing (yes, 10cm of the actual tubing) in it, and get in a liter of fluid in about 60 seconds. kind of crazy. but very cool.

one of them women here, a fantastic midwife from malawi, reported that her own mother had been saved by this technique when she developed eclampsia during the delivery of her 9th (and final) child.