Super Sterilizer AWAYYYY!!!

My Sierra Leoneon supervisor Dorothy is on vacation, so I’m the new head sterilizer. I’ve started calling myself the Super Sterilizer and humming superhero theme songs whenever I enter the operating rooms. This behaviour is a direct result of the fact that I spent five days in a row last week either on the ship or on the 400-yard stretch of dock in front of it, and only encountered direct sunlight once on Wednesday when I took out the trash, and then again Friday night when I finished work a few minutes before sundown. Point being, I didn’t have much to write about except for skin meshers and dermatomes, so I stole someone else’s story for the week.

Chris is a Canadian (almost American, but not quite…here I digress) who recently started working in medical supply and is planning on going to med school. As far as I can tell, he spends most of his time playing hide-and-seek with his poor boss, and can usually be found hanging around the OR, entertaining us in the sterilizing room or peeking in the operating rooms to see what’s going on. He had Thursday off and went out to work with our land-based Eye Clinic; he came rushing into the OR upon his return to the ship to tell us of his adventures.

Characteristically, he had wondered off from the Eye Clinic to the nearby Redemption Hospital and asked if he could see their OR. Seeing his Mercy Ships scrubs, they brought him right in without further questioning and let him watch three Caesarean Sections. The first delivery was the fourth child of a woman whose previous three babies had died; this was her first living child, and even better in a culture like this where the male offspring of a woman is a reflection of her value, it was a son.

The second operation was on a woman who had already had 17 children, with 10 of them still alive. The doctors decided during the surgery that they were going to tie her fallopian tubes to prevent any further pregnancies; when Chris asked if they had asked her permission, they informed him that ‘No. But it is good.’ Chris then asked if he could take a picture with the surgeon after the operation, and the agreeable surgeon said that of course he could take a picture, and in fact he could take it right away. So everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and turned to smile in the middle of the operation, the surgeon still holding the poor woman’s ill-fated tubes.

Medical ethics, oh my...