Kenyan Power

I’ve been back in the OR a little bit lately because the OB/GYN is back from leave, and a mzungu orthopedic surgeon is now operating once a week. Wednesday was a full day of cesarean sections, hernia repairs, and mending of broken bones in various ways. Good fun.

Here's the OR, in case anyone hasn't seen it yet:



Adding to the fun was the fact that no fewer than 15 times did the power go out that day. When this happens, the OR is pitch dark, the ACs shut off, everything. It’s pretty amazing how quickly those rooms heat up without AC, and it makes me thankful that we’re not in a place where there are no ACs in the OR. These dark spells last for about 20 seconds, at which point the backup generators kick on and all is well again (for about 30 minutes or so). It’s a little unnerving to have someone’s body open and all of a sudden you can’t see your hands in front of you. As you might imagine, the best thing to do in that situation is to just stop everything and wait for the power to return, so not to cut anything vital.

I’m not sure how the power grid here works; I know that in the US there are often outages when everyone’s ACs are working overtime, but there just aren’t many ACs here to begin with, and very few people run then during the day (it’s very expensive). I guess the simplest explanation is that the power grid is poorly designed.

Anyway, the surgeries were interesting. The guy with the femur fracture required a lot of traction to get the bone in place so a rod could be placed in the middle of it, and I was the biggest guy around (surprise, I know), so I was called in for the job. If you took a picture and photoshopped out the blood and the bones and inserted a placid lake, you would have thought I was waterskiing, I was leaning back so far. Someone at the head of the table had to hold his shoulders so I didn’t pull him off of the table. Ahh, the subtle art of orthopedics.