Coastal Maine Global Health Fellowship

Today was a day unlike any of my other days here. Jen was gone, I was (and am still) alone with just Mew, and things were just a little busier than has been "normal".... It started at 7am with a call in broken english about a woman who had just had a vaginal delivery "something, something 30 minutes". I show up in the L&D suite with a woman in the lithotomy position with a bowl of blood between her legs and a blood pressure ~60/40. "Retained placenta, 45 minutes". I quickly try to assess the situation and what I needed to do, which I knew was to get the placenta out. I called Jen, and through video call he walked me through the process which involved putting my entire forearm in the woman's uterus and peeling the attached placenta from her uterus posteriorly until I was able to remove it. It came out, thank god. Her BP stayed stable normalized with IVF, and she stopped bleeding.  830 rounds, (after the daily morning worship). The inpatient d

Thanks to Sriwilai and Lit, just a couple of Niramin and Rohith's many amazing family members here in Huay Malai, as well as a couple of our saviors since we've been here in Thailand, we now have wheels! Lit and Sriwilai brought the bike to us before we left for Vientiane, but until this past weekend we hadn't ventured more than 10 minutes down the road. So after rounds and clinic on Saturday, we decided to venture to the big city of Sangkhla Buri for our first solo trip out of Huay Malai. Luckily, the road between Huay Malai and Sangkhla really is amazing--better than a lot of the roads I grew up driving on in western Maine. But, new for us is driving on the left hand side of the road, wild dogs everywhere, hilly and windy jungle roads, and, for Chris, manually shifting up and down all those turns and hills. He did an amazing job though and we made it town, albeit somewhat slowly, but safely. (We thought we were bad ass going 45 mph the whole way, but we later realized

Since we were in Thailand on a 30 day tourist visa, we had to leave the country to extend our visa to "non-immigrant O" status which is a visa of 3 months duration. We tried to figure this all out before leaving the states, but long story short we didn't get it all figured out, so alas, a visit to Laos it is. We made a quick stopover in Bangkok for a night to visit with Chris' brother Tyler who was in the country for work, and then made our way to Vientiane. Bangkok skyline Vientiane is a much more manageable city than Bangkok, which can be completely overwhelming with millions of people, cars, smells, and consumerism everywhere. We were excited to get to Vientiane where we heard there was great food (PIZZA!) and good beer (in Thailand we'd only tried Singha and Chang once and were deeply disappointed...).  Sadly though Chris came down with a vicious fever/GI bug our first night there and we spent a lot of our time watching movies and playing Ca

I need to get better at this blogging thing. It's not like I have absolutely no time to sit down and write, in fact I have more time now to think and write than I have since starting medical school. So, I really have no excuse. I guess I have been using the excuse that I couldn't upload my photos onto my computer after my iPhone 6 died and I had to get an android here in Sangkhla Buri, but now I've figured that out too, so really I've just been lazy. Chris and I have started to settle into life here in Huay Malai. After one week of working in the hospital, I think I'm starting to figure out what I can offer to the hospital here and how I can contribute. Currently there are more doctors here than have historically been here in the past, which is nice to have plenty of support. Dr. Jen is a Singaporean general surgeon who has been our saving grace since landing here. His family welcomed us warmly and he has been amazingly helpful as we've transitioned into ou

And now..greetings from Thailand! It's taken a while for me to get back online as we have been in a bit of a transition period, to say the least. We left the US on 9/22 and flew to Vienna where we took a one week stop over to visit one of my good friends from college and her husband. We spent a couple of days wandering around Vienna and went to Budapest, Hungary over the weekend, which was AMAZING. We had an amazing time walking all around the city, cruising down the Danube that ran through the middle of the city, eating langos, and getting Megan and Juan addicted to Settlers of Catan:) Travel Catan on the train! After a lovely week long break visiting Megan and Juan it was time to take the next step in our journey and get to Thailand! We flew overnight and landed in Bangkok the morning of 9/30. The old director of Kwai River Christian Hospital met us at the airport along with our driver Toe and we were off. We spent that day coordinating our visa documentation, gett