“Please turn your head and cough” …yep.

Haha. Ha. Ok. So this past week has been filled with great and exciting things 😀 I’m not really good with social boundaries… I typically act wildly offensive because I don’t really know when a joke has gone too far, and at times have difficulty understanding the concept of “TMI”.  So if this entry is semi inappropriate…apologies.  But it’s too entertaining…at least to me…not to share.
 
So last Friday, Mary and I found Dr. Henry who works at the hospital we visit and who knows we’re going to nursing school when we get back to the states. Key words: going to nursing school…UPON OUR RETURN to the states. Aka…we haven’t gone already and should not be diagnosing patients yet…if at all…ever. But hey…TIA (this is Africa) as the saying goes.
 
ANYWAYS… we found him and Dr. Florence in the outpatient building, waiting to see a super long line of people, diagnose them and set appointments for when they could come back to be treated.  After watching and listening to his explanations for a while, he decided it was time we got our own patient to diagnose. So he handed us the next person’s booklet of information (most of which we couldn’t read at all because it was in Lwo) and sent the next patient in to us while he saw another one, separately.  As we looked in the booklet, we could, however, decipher the word “hernia” …which was enough to make us slightly horrified…me more so, especially when Mary said “Well…you’re the one wearing a glove!” …A fear further validated when the man looked at me, pointed to his crotch and said “my testicles”. Oh lanta. I decided I should probably suck it up seeing as no one wants to be examined by medical personnel who find the situation infinitely more awkward than the patient…but seeing as I’m NOT a nurse, I didn’t really have any idea of what to do apart from asking him to turn his head and cough…not that I actually have any clue what results that action should ideally yield (don’t worry, I now know)…and Mary didn’t really offer anything super insightful… so in my great effort of maturity and unspoken thoughts of “wow…this is my life”, I awkwardly avoided eye contact and asked him to take his pants off. Yep.
 
You probably don’t want in depth details about the next several minutes, but I will say it ultimately resulted in me running to get Dr. Henry and yelling halfway across the room to him about our horror at some very atypical male anatomy and Dr. Henry laughing at our less than professional reactions, thinking we are super immature and probably slightly stupid mzungus. Bright side – we now know what a hydrosil is and how to treat it. Yup. Oh. Another bright side – after beginning our medical experience in Africa…there’s no way nursing in America could be nearly as awkward or difficult to witness. Only up from here. Hahah. Oh goodness…this situation was just straight up cray. Not to mention Henry mocking us and our American euphemisms.
 
Ok. Time to lock it up.
While I’m on the topic of the hospital though, there were definitely other significant moments there. Ugh…this one was really hard to watch. For a while, Mary and I were following/helping the nurses in the female surgical ward. Haha – we told them we wanted to learn from them cause we were going to be nurses and the one in charge was like “So you came to Uganda to get experience?” ….well…no, not exactly. But she let us follow anyways.
 
So we came to this family who had been caught in a fire. There was a tiny baby who looked fine – apparently the mom had made it out with the baby and had gone back in for her older daughter, Miriam, who looked like she was maybe 5 or 6. The mom had burns all over her arms and legs…but it mostly just looked like she had been charred. The little girl was covered in bandages…everywhere. All around her face and arms and stomach and sides and legs. Most of her body was pink and bleeding from where the skin had been burnt off.  The nurses started to pour saline solution onto the bandages so that we could get them off and put new ones on. As they slowly peeled away at them, the little girl stared down at herself with an expression that seemed sort of like “What the heck happened to me…” The bandages on her face came off pretty easily, but as they began to take the ones on her arms off, they stuck and pulled at the obviously raw flesh. She was being super strong but when they started pulling she couldn’t keep from screaming…the parts of her that still had skin on them were literally coming off in strips…she was probably on next to no pain meds since they don’t have hardly any at the hospital.  She was obviously in so much pain that we decided to pray with her…it was a little awkward crossing that line of our reason for being at the hospital, changing it from medical purposes to being missionaries again…since the nurses thought we were there to shadow…I don’t know how well it was received but whatever, at that point it was kind of irrelevant.
 
It took over an hour to change all of her bandages and there were moments where I wasn’t sure if I’ve ever prayed for someone so hard in my life before…I don’t know. It’s difficult to figure out my thoughts on this. Because I know that God allows things to happen that don’t make sense to us and that he allows us to go through pain…his thoughts are not our thoughts…but it’s hard to see that in the moment. And we weren’t even asking for complete healing in that situation…just that she could get through the hour with some relief from the pain. I don’t know…thoughts that I just haven’t completely unjumbled yet. There was one moment though…Mary put her hands out so that Miriam could slap or hold them when it got really painful, and she slapped them then pointed to me to put my hands down and just went down the row over and over slapping our hands and it seemed like in that moment she was a kid again, playing with the crazy white people that came to see her, and that for about 10 seconds, she forgot she was completely burnt and bleeding and in pain and I guess if nothing else, God allowed us that moment with her. Gave her that moment to hopefully encourage her and show her that people love her. And I think that was enough.
 
Anyways…we performed the Everything skit at church for Easter. We weren’t sure it was going to translate…gah…but by the end of it the whole church was cheering in their African  “AY AY AY AY AY” way…and people came up to us and told us it made them cry. That was awesome. If you haven’t seen the skit…heres a link! Hopefully we’ll be able to post ours soon 🙂 Love and miss yalllll! 
 
Everything Skit- 
http://youtu.be/cyheJ480LYA