OK people, i have arrived. actually i have been here for 2 weeks and i know, i know i have been slack in writing. so sorry...... ok, so new york.... it was wonderful seeing my aunts and cousins. they are hilarious and i love them so much. right now we are going through some sort of crisis with my aunt, but she is doing very well, so thats good. but it means that since she is in LA by herself, the family has been playing tag team, so there is always one family member there with her since before she had her surgery. isn't that amazing, i mean, i knew of the love and caring in my fam, but its great ti see it out worked some more..... neways so that is fam.
my elective is also very cool. the room i'm in is right around the corner from the hospital and on the 15th floor. i also don't mean a jamaican around the corner, which could mean miles down the road, but i mean 2 min away. the first couple of days i was walking back and forth from the hospital to my room every chance i had, and i had so many things to organize that there was lots of walking around. when i woke up on my first morning of work, guess what i saw when i looked out my window.... SNOW..... i was like wow. i hadn't seen snow in a bit, so it was cool. that happened this morning too. snow, snow, snow... it reminded me of college in pennsylvania. neways so all of that is cool, its cold, but that's what i expected. i have my winter stuff here so no prob.
in terms of actual work,its been good, i'm mainly based in the clinic but do ward rounds in the morning. this week i'm stationed at the chealsea clinic which is the lower west side on 24th street. the hospital is on the upper east side, so i have to grab the subway cross town in the mornings. thats cool, im enjoying living in manhatten... here is an excerpt from an email i sent about my time here... this was a week ago....
in terms of the things i have seen, it is simply amazing and heart rending and just too much to even fully express in an email. gosh some of these people are simply amazing i don't know how they deal with everything that they have to go through. for many of them, HIV is the least of their problems. if i allow it to it could get to me and break my heart every 2 seconds. and some of the stories of people sabotaging themselves and their health...... frustrating.... i'll tell you more when i get back. we'll sit and have a loooooong chat. so its fascinating and HIV is one of the most interesting, frustrating and 'intelligent' viruses, it uses the most positive things about our immune system against us. that is why it is incurable (apart from of course the miraculous, as we know God can do amazing things). the treatment is really a testament to God enabling us through science, seriously in the last 20-25 years there have been 25 newly FDA approved drugs for the treatment of HIV. that is one drug per year... that is just remarkable. if u look at something like TB, Hep C or herpes, there are only either one up to 5 drugs to treat any one of them and they are really old drugs....... just amazing.... neways, i'm learning heaps
So.....the clinic is absolutely amazing. and it amazes me what can be done with resources....here is what the clinic is like... the doctors offices are equiped with lots of equipment and the beds are state of the art, then in the clinic you have a truly multidisciplinary team, like lots of social workers, 3 or more psychiatrists.......around 6-8 doctors, infectious disease and internists, 5 nurses, a OB/GYN, lab techs and phlebotomists, and other staff and each patient is assigned to a team that involves doc, social worker, psych if needed, nurses. the lab results come back many times the next day. i sat in with the OB/GYN and it was interesting what could be done in the examination room. u can diagnose STI's right in the room...no syndromic treatement. they make the slides there and then walk across the room and look at them under the microscope and then turns around and says to the patient, so you have a bit of trich..blah blah blah... or its just some BV.... for GC and chlamydia they send out for cultures and wait for the results, then treat. all the speculums are disposable, i just had to look on and just laugh. it was truely an eye opener. now this is not to say that this is how it is everywhere. this particular clinic gets a lot of funding so they are very lucky, but the contrast between what i was seeing at home and what i am seeing here is glaringly obvious. it makes me want that for home.
neways i have yacked on for quite a bit... next week i start public health and learning about the american health system. THAT should be interesting...... i'll write more about fun stuff in the next installment.....
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