Tristan v2.0 - Teaching at the King Faisal Hospital

Tristan v2.0 - Teaching at the King Faisal Hospital

Little known fact: After Fievel went West in 1991, he kept going west… ending up in in Rwanda, where he settled his small Mousekewitz family, made some wise political moves, dethroned the then king, and ushered in a brief reign of peace among the mice of the country. They named the new hospital after him, but, owing to the pronunciation in the Bantu language spoken here, where “v” takes on an “s” sound, if proceeded by an ‘ie’ and followed by “el”, the spoken name sounds like Faisal, and thus the sign-maker, a gentleman named Claude (pronounced “Frank”, for similar reasons), fashioned the sign above the door to read “King Faisal”. Although terribly embarrassing for Claude, he was saved horrible public disgrace because, purely coincidentally, the major funder of the hospital was a philanthropic foundation, named after King Faisal bin Abdulaziz, who ruled Saudi Arabia from 1964-1975.  

Dylan, you can perhaps get a sense that twitter is not my ideal medium…

Okay, so Week 2 almost done and dusted, and many great experiences to relate, most of which are firsts, for me.

1. Gorilla Trekking: A few pictures on twitter and facebook already, but hard to do justice to the connection I felt sitting mere feet away from curious infants, rough and tumble juveniles, temperamental mothers and 500lb, brooding Silverbacks… probably 15, all within a ten foot radius, at one point. We got so lucky that the sun was shining and they weren’t particularly concerned about hiking all over the mountain, letting us soak up their company and snap pics to our hearts content. Just incredible.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Spinal anesthesia in a 7 year old with a fractured femur: Just not done where I’ve trained, because 7 year olds shouldn’t be able to handle sitting still to get the medication into the CSF, through a small needle in the back. This little guy did though… like a champ. We had fun counting to twenty in four different languages as the anesthesia resident deftly got set up and performed the minor miracle. Both the spinalizer and the spinalized are going places… big places. OR went great. Perfect anesthesia.
3. Sim scenario: On Monday, I introduced the sim afternoon session and essentials of communication for the anesthesia residents, ran the sim and debriefed everyone afterwards, which was a great experience for me and something I’ve not done back in Halifax. Great participation by all the residents make these sessions particularly enjoyable. Thanks to Patty for paving the way. Running simulated anesthetics is quite fun, although I continually have to stop myself from sending the sim person into a vfib arrest at the click of a button. Thanks to SimMon software for practical solution to low tech sim. 
4. Teaching and Learning course: Patty’s expressed how happy this course made her (x3, I believe), and I completely agree: It was great. She did a stellar job teaching 3 of the 4 sessions and then just as the post-lunch food coma was settling in around the room, saddled me with the last afternoon session, teaching a 45 min lecture on mentorship in medicine to surgeons and anesthesia residents who have no concept of mentorship in place currently, having only seen the lecture slides the night before, with the national Rwandan football team playing a African Nations Championship game in the city concurrently… it’s hard to say no to Patty, as many of you may know.   Haha. She clearly knows best though, and I had a great time teaching and they apparently had a great time hearing about these foreign concepts and how mentoring may help in this system. The most common suggestion on our feedback cards was “More of this, earlier in residency!”.
5.  OR teaching: I was worried I wouldn’t have enough to talk about when residents asked me questions in the OR, but I think it’s a credit to my own teachers in the past few years that I seem to be reasonably well equipped to chat about most of the anesthesia related queries I am posed.

Alright, enough’s enough. You get it: I like teaching.

Until next time, Umunsi Mwiza (pronounced “Have a nice day”, again, for the above-mentioned, complicated, Bantu-derived diction. Ironically, it is the only phrase that actually sounds like it’s meaning in English, when spoken in Kinyarwandan by a native speaker)