Way out there

Well I’m getting farther off the beaten track these days and it will come as no surprise to those that know me that I’m having the time of my professional life. Yesterday I found myself with one of my mentees, Cathy, in a town very reminiscent of the way Hood River must have been at the turn of the last century; small, familiar, with the onsite health care provider (a male nurse) firmly in charge of who got seen for what and when.

There we were way off the beaten track, in the winter rain, at the medical-cultural-commercial center of a village; its health outpost. The onsite nurse knew everyone and was drawing blood on kids with HIV for CD-4 counts, dispensing meds, chiding patients for not taking their meds properly, flirting with the ladies, and sending us the truly sick that he had triaged. The clinic was very……. what, “guy”. Things were generally neat, but sloppy and might have been underneath stacks of stuff. He knew where everything was just that it might be under something. And he could draw blood out of a mosquito.

We saw all manner of rural HIV and co-morbidities, still saw lots of somatic stuff, and in general had a gas. The school was next to the clinic, across from the rural Botswanan equivalent of a 7- eleven, down the path from the town admin building. We left cold and a little wet as the clinic leaked, but warmed from the adventure and the medicine.

Friday I and Cathy go waaaaay off the road into rural southern Botswana to a remote health outpost. The medicine is as fun and challenging, as are these destinations. This weekend Lynne and I are off to SA to stay at a game reserve and see some larger game (lions, elephants, and the like), then Monday I hit the road for another tour of the western frontier hospitals. Then we head for the US and Oregon. Hard to believe that I’m coming up on a year away from CGFM. I must say I miss the people in my previous life deeply but have no regrets to be doing this at this time in my career. I'm truly fotunate and indeed blessed.