Assessment Day

What a day! Out of bed at 5.30am and on the road to Banepa by 7:15am!

Today saw over 100 patients assessed for surgery which took us all the way through the day with just 20 minutes to spare for the nursing staff to make their dash for Kathmandu for their registration process. It seems that we’ll have approximately 40 patients to perform surgery on starting tomorrow.

There were many new patients and a few repeat “customers” with the highlight of the day being the return of Bina, the darling of the burns team. Bina has been seeing the team on an off for almost 10 years. As a child she fell into an open fire after suffering an epileptic fit and remained in the fire for several minutes. With traumatic burns to her face, neck, chest and arm she spent most of her childhood and youth hiding herself from her neighbourhood. Bina now proudly proclaims herself as being beautiful with bright lipstick on her restructured lips, bright blue eyeliner on her restructured eyelids and luminous nail polish on her one good hand. It is difficult to describe the sense of pride and happiness in seeing climb from a place of such sadness and loneliness and watch her blossom onto a courageous and bright eyed woman. She’s an inspiration to the team and to the patients who’s ward she shares every few years for another procedure.

Every year we have patients that we unfortunately cannot treat. Sometimes the burns scar is too minor and we need to prioritise to more needy cases, sometimes it’s significant orthopaedic or oncological complexities that require additional expertise and equipment and we refer them to a fellow hospital. This year we referred two patients to the local orthopaedic specialist hospital and two patients to the care of the local plastic surgeon, Dr Mathema. This is because their treatment required significant repeat serial surgeries and inout from an oncologist and intense physiotherapy. It’s great to know that we can refer patients that come to us to likeminded hospitals and doctors.

As I type this, the nursing team have returned triumphantly from registrations and we’re good to go now for tomorrow. There is a renewed excitement in the air and much both adoring and ribbing of poor Adam. Apparently male nurses in Nepal are very few and far between and most of the registration interview process centred on Adam, especially the younger nurse on the panel. Whilst some serious medical related questions were asked, the team now knows what Adam’s favourite colour, meal and birthday is and what he uses to style his hair. All very important questions it seems as their sheer love for Adam meant they overlooked the 200+ years of combined nursing experience of the rest of the team and passed them all anyway. We expect to see some Blue Steel photo’s of Adam on this trip.