Dr. Geelhoed journal entry 9 Feb 2011 (part 1)

Series: 11-FEB-B-6

A DAWN RUN THAT BRINGS OUT THREE OTHER OF OUR TEAM TO RUN AT WERKOK AS I AM STILL RESOLVING THE URI, A LONG EFFORT AT COMPLETING THE REPORTS OF THE MISSION IS COMPLETED, THEN MYSTICALLY DELETED, BEING LOST, AS WE ARE SWELTERING IN THE DRY SEASON SUN AWAITING THE ARRIVAL OF THE CONTAINER AND REVIEWING TROPICAL MEDICINE TUTORIALS

February 9, 2011

I may be disturbing the bats with my coughing and sneezing which reached their worst point since my exposure in the Philippines this morning, not enough to keep me from going out on the run.  I did my pre-dawn run and spotted three of my team mates on returning as they set out: Kirtus, KP and Zach out to do a bit less in distance but with great enthusiasm since they are going to try to give it a go in the Saturday run of the Jonglei Marathon!

After breakfast we gathered at the shade tree which has a ring of chairs set up for the conference each day which usually starts with a brief devotional by one member and hen a review of eh business of the day.  The people who were here today included Kathryn Thomas and Aaron Bopp who made it over by road with Jacob doing his least favorite drive—the road from Juba where he picked them up. I have just learned important news—in Kathryn’s luggage is an InterSon Probe—not the one we had tried to return but another so we will be able to demonstrate its use after all and then when ours arrives it can go to one of the other laptops which we programmed for everyone to have sonography capability.

This means Jacob was not here for our formal presentation of each of our staff and he asked it be done in a more expedited way to day by me introducing each of the participants—which I did—a good team and the people from the community are impressed with the talents and capacities represented here, such as the personnel recovery and resuscitation of two term Afghanistan Special Forces veteran josh Webster.  I hope his special skills are not needed this time as they certainly were last time.  I introduced all around and then they went to clinic to review a small number of patients.  We are not on a major road and we do not have a market or intersection nearby so we are fortunate in not having been mobbed as we might have been in Tanzania and as we surely will be next in PiBor and CAR.  The slow star may have disappointed a few of the eager, but I used the time to try to get rid of the annoying hangover of the URI which I am going to start considering history as of now.  I set to work trying to bring up to date the reports I had written and try to spell check the ones I had typed.  The problem was, each time I spell checked it was still undone and would need repeating.

I will give you the good news and the bad all at once.  KP Samy built his own computer to start his expertise and is a whizz at debugging.  So, with his nearly instant help, I moved out of the only program that would open, the Open Office, and shifted the default to Word Starter of Windows Seven.  I tried to get around the problem of cursor jump and did my best to now start re-spell checking in the Windows Seven Word Starter.  Good enough.

I had completed the whole of a six and a half page document on 11-Feb-B-4 and saved it.  When I attempted to re-open it, all I got were multiple copies of 11-Feb-B-3, the short invitation letter from Rev Oruzu.  It seemed that the completed all day 11-Feb-B-4 had just poofed, and even KP could not find it or resurrect it.

I considered cursing all computers for all time, but that would really just erase the link you have with this mission which is really going well, so I bit the bullet and went back to re-do what I could remember of the six pages of 11-Feb-B-4 and spell checked and saved it.  I am reluctant to open it to check to see if it is there, since I assure you I will not re-re-do it a third time!

I have teased KP that since I am continuously in technoglitches I cannot release him at the end of next week and he is being dragooned into going the rest of the way with us!  But I believe he should do what it best for him without coercion as I think we have a good team with depth.

Much of the day was used in preparation for the arrival of the container which will be an event of some scrambling to get the coverage of this event, and to have the different participants who will share “ownership” of the contents all making allocations of what will be sent along by road transit.  We are also assigning the conferences of the selected topics for each participants such as what Dan Fong calls “”Bruce Willis”—the disease brucellosis which he has just learned bout, the one I call the supreme irony of a cattle culture which seeks cattle to insure fertility which gives spontaneous abortions as a complication.

Since it is now late in the day and the truck has not yet arrived, we will plan for it to be here tomorrow our first operating day on which a number of hernias are scheduled to arrive.  We will also have Ajak back from his stay in Bor and we will have a few items packed up from the stock we are carrying as well as additional items we will get form the container to take forward to Bor for our shuttle onward to PiBor.  Things are going well even if at a slow stagger start, but the timing should be critically perfect for our launch of the Network of South Sudanese collaborative mission medicine centers for supplies and continuing education.

The topics for tonight’s tutorials include infant pneumonias, trauma resuscitation, malaria and ultrasonography in Obstetrics and antenatal care

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