Another First!

On the first postoperative day Patty, a voluteer internest from Cambridge, MA is ambulatory and in the library negotiating with the travel insurance company on Margie's phone (6 cents per minute with the local phone plan vs. $3 per minute using her phone) for rearranging her trip back to Boston. Yesterday morning she developed right lower quadrant pain, having been up all the preceeding night with more generalized abdominal pain. We did an ultrasound exam on her and confirmed the clinical suspicion of acute appendicitis, and at the experienced surgeon's recommendation, she was operated on immediately. This occured the day before her scheduled flight home.This is the first time that a Sihanouk Hospital volunteer has undergone surgery at our hospital here. The evaluation and treatment could not have been more expeditious if this had happened in the States. A very acute appendix was found, ready to rupture. So far her post operative course has been thankfully uneventful, but they want to keep her a few more days, just to be on the conservative side, rather than encounter an emergency over the Pacific. They put her in the isolataion room on the surgical ward, to give her some privacy. Margie has been visiting with her several times today, to keep her spirits up, which has been succesful.

Dinner with Myrna from Brooklyn, whom we met at the Chabad at the bris. She has spent part of every year for the last ten years teaching chemistry at the Royal College of Phnom Penh.

Dinner with Rae, form the U.K., whom we met at the hotel a couple of weeks ago. We reconnected after her art tour of Cambodia.

One of the Radiology Department secretaries was sent to buy a chicken to be used for ultrasound instruction for the trainees.

A large seed is placed inside the fowl to be found with the ultrasound probe as a teaching tool

Vannarith insisted on buying me the best fried banana in Phnom Penh, and it truly was

Margie visited the Goldstone school, also affilited with Hope International, and had the pleasure of reading to the children. Here she introduces them to Curious George

Chamreon the "librarian" at the hospital accompanied Margie