Today Colleen and I went to Nairobi with Dr Hansen, who was going to help an Egyptian doc there with a couple of pediatric surgery cases. They were both young boys with an descended testicle. This drastically increases the risk of testicular cancer so it is an important operation.
The Egyptian surgeon is a Coptic Christian, which apparently is very similar to Greek Orthodox (the inside of the Coptic church at the hospital looks just like my dad's church - look for pictures soon). His name is Safwat, and he took us to lunch at an Egyptian restaurant by the hospital after the cases and told us his story.
He had been in Egypt and wanted to get married, but his in laws wouldn't let their daughter go until he had a reliable job. So they wouldn't let him do more residency training in Britain, but they were fine when he got a contract to work in Uganda. So he boarded a plane thirty years ago to start his career in Uganda.
But he never made it. He got to Nairobi and his connection was canceled because of violence in Uganda. He stayed in Nairobi while waiting for it to clear up but it never did, and anyway he got recruited to work in Kenya before even two weeks. He was fresh out of training, but was supposed to work under the other surgeon at the hospital. That surgeon basically retired like three days after Safwat started, so he was it, the only surgeon.
He did everything: neurosurgery cases, ped cases, ortho cases, OB/gyn cases, even though he was barely trained for some of them. In fact, he did even more. Apparently the anesthesiologist was a drunk so he sometimes anesthetized the patients and then operated on them. In fact, sometimes the hospital would not even have extra blood on hand. So he would donate blood and then operate!
Course he has been in Kenya for thirty years or so now and the Coptic hospital seems very nice. It has two operating rooms and decent enough equipment. Plus they are working on a new building for the hospital, so things must be going well.
The cases went so well in fact that we were done well before rush hour and made it out of Nairobi without much difficulty.
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