End of Week 1- Monday

To be honest, this has been such a long week. It was draining and so full that I got physically ill from exhaustion. Yesterday I woke up and vomited twice. I was nauseous and for the first time in my life I almost fainted at the sight of blood. The only way I could watch surgery was by sitting down. I had to skip morning rotations because I had a headache and stomach problems. I think it was because I was so sleep deprived (for more reasons than just jet lag) and havn't been eating what I normally do that my body went into total freak out. At one point my body was shaking when I was standing. I even had huge temperature shifts where I was sweating, red, and hot to where I was freezing cold and required a blanket in 80 degree weather. So, needless to say, I could use a weekend. One without structure and without an overload of new information. I'll tell ya, learning about new cultures can be tiring. Combining it with the study of medicine, my back going out 4 times, and it's pretty much a recipe for exhaustion.

There's just so much to say about this week.

I'll try to break it into parts to make it less of a chore to read.

I could start with Monday, I guess. We arrived in Pune Sunday night and on Monday we began a rotation at a pediatric hospital. We saw many interesting cases: bone cancer in a 3 year old girl that caused a lung to collapse, a baby born with lack of lubrication in the lungs, jaundice, attempted suicide, and to top it off an anal fissure (post op). It was disturbing at times but so enlightening too. One thing that really stood out is that the doctor said that if babies are premature and present with complications the parents are more likely to establish treatment if the baby is a boy, and "discard" the baby if it is a girl.

I guess this is a huge issue in India. First, it is illegal for a physician to tell the sex of the baby because the rate of female fetuscide is so high here. Second, culturally women are not seen as valuable, they are more or less a financial burden on their family. Because of this male babies are highly preferred, but socially it has greatly reduced the male to female ratio. One thing Ummda (the NGO ran by the Dabaks) is trying to do is educate that girls are just as good as boys. Right now I don't know how I feel about this. Of course I'm upset about it when I think about it, I mean no one likes to think that these people are having gender abortions even though it's a healthy pregnancy. I hate the fact, too, that parents would stop treatment on their baby girl but not on their baby boy. It makes me sad to think about it.