Thanks from Galmi Hospital

So the work has begun. Lots of surgery and surgical clinic. I'm so blessed to be here. I pray that I'm at least half as much of a blessing to the missionaries and locals here as they are to me. I've been working with the two surgeons here: Dr. Starke (who went to ORU medical school with Dr. Duininick, Dr. Powell, Dr. Rylander, and Dr. Boyles) and Dr. Sanoussi (who's from the area, and has just returned two years ago after completing his training). Both of them have taught me so much in the two days I've been with them. Surgery and medicine is so different in resource limited hospitals/areas, and there is no way I'd ever receive such crucial training in the US. So many thanks to the people reasonable for the medicines I brought with me to Niger. A million people here have thanked me, and I've told them I'll pass it along. They normally order the medicines that they can't get here once a year from a ministry in the US and they're delivered once a year. Anticipating annual needs poses an obvious dilemma, especially when some visiting doctors may prefer one medicine or and other for a given condition/disease. The medicines I brought were the ones they were out of and still have like 3+ months to go til the next shipment. So some one asked before I left why they were needing Carbemazepine (an antiseizure medicine that is not usually the first one a doctor would try in the US, nor a cheap one). Well here's the answer. It's not first-line (the first medicine of a certain type that a doctor would prescribe) here either. It's about the second or third. So they'd been out of Carbemazepine the day the medicine arrived. There was a little girl in the hospital/ER with a seizure. They'd already tried Phenabarbitol and Phenytoin, but she was still seizing. Carbemazepine had worked in the past but they were out so they tried Lamotragine,but she was still seizing. Then the meds got there, so they gave her a dose and the seizure stopped. So thanks again for the medicine.