Midnight rambles

It's been a week since my last post, and I don't really know what to write about at the moment, so here are some random thoughts before I go to sleep:

I think I'm becoming somewhat institutionalized, eating in a cafeteria. My stomach starts growling at 12:00 and 5:00 every day.

I went to fabric street yesterday. I bought some fabric. A pickpocket tried to get in our bags, but was unsuccessful. I carry a bag that zips up all the way for just that reason.

There's dried baby drool all over my scrub top right now. I don't really care.

People from England will never approve of Americans' pronunciation. I wonder what they'd think if they visited Texas? ;-P

We've had triple max-fax surgeries the past few weeks, which means D ward has been busy...and we're overflowing into C ward and B ward.

I now automatically introduce myself as "Root." Nobody understands me when I say "Ruth."

I walked into C ward today and heard my patient from last week, an older lady named Isatu, excitedly call out "Root!" I looked up and she beckoned me over, a big grin on her face, and grasped my hand and gave me a hug. I love moments like that.

I miss my boyfriend. Six months is a long time.

My boyfriend sent me jalapeno cheddar cheetos. I'm trying to make them last at least a week.

I've started looking at nursing jobs online several days a week. Which probably doesn't make sense, cause those jobs will be taken by the time I get home. But I can't help myself...

I went to a local church service on Sunday. It was really long, and I was tired. But I didn't fall asleep, cause they had ushers patrolling the aisles, on the look-out for people who fell asleep, and nudging them awake and shaking their heads at them disapprovingly.

This is Aminata. She's the princess of D ward. The drool on my scrubs is hers.

More highlights from the past week

After the beach excursion Saturday, it was nice to have another day off work to just relax and do nothing. Most of Sunday I could be found outside on Deck 8, reading a book or lying out by the pool with some friends. I actually swam a little bit too - my first time in the pool. When the ship rocks a lot, it turns into a wave pool and the water pretty much carries you from one end to the other.

On Sunday evening, a few friends and I walked up Bad Boy Lane (the road leading down to the docks) to visit the patients at the Hope Center. Several of our max-fax patients had been discharged that day, and it was fun to go see them, take pictures, and play with the kids for a couple of hours, as well as meet some patients who haven't had their surgeries yet. It started to rain a little while we were there, but nobody really cared. As soon as we walked up to where the patients were gathered outside, a little girl named Lucia, about 4 or 5 years old, with a big tumor on her face ran up and gave us all hugs. I'd never met her before, but apparently she didn't care - she was more than ready to be friends. :) Hopefully she'll feel the same way when we're taking care of her on the ward soon. Another group of crewmembers from the ship was there at the same time as us, doing a Bible lesson/puppet show for the patients. When the show started, Lucia reached up her arms to me, clearly wanting some snuggle time. So I stood and held her throughout the entire show, and remembered what I love about this place. Priceless moment: standing with a group of patients out in the drizzling African rain, singing "Tell Papa God tenki," while a little girl wraps her arms around my neck, puts her head on my chest, and falls asleep. When the puppet show was over and it was time for us to go back to the ship, several of the patients walked with us across the yard to the gate. Across the street someone was playing loud hip-hop music, and we all started dancing as we walked. After we'd waved goodbye and headed down the road to the docks, we looked back and saw some of the patients still dancing as they returned to the buildings. Fun times.

Monday was Canadian Thanksgiving! Something I've never thought about before, but we have a lot of Canadians on board. I won't say no to Thanksgiving dinner in October...or anytime, for that matter. :)

Tuesday evening we all got an interesting show to watch. Down on the dock, someone drove a forklift off the edge and into the water! Thankfully there was nobody in the forklift when it went down. Within minutes there was a crew of engineers and deck hands wearing hard hats and looking important on the dock, cranes and chains were being set up for the retrieval of the wayward forklift (now covered by 30 feet of water and 5 feet of mud), and the dive team was donning their wet suits and flippers and jumping into the murky water. I was in the peanut gallery out on the top deck of the ship, looking down on all the action while also enjoying a beautiful sunset to the west and lightning show to the east. Who needs TV in a place like this? Check out Heather's blog for pictures.

Ship Holiday

It seems like multiple times throughout a week something will happen that I plan on blogging about later...and then by the time I sit down and start writing, I've completely forgotten what it was I wanted to write about. So, I've thought back over the past week, and jotted down some of the little highlights to share. Here are a couple of them:

Friday's excitement involved some of my coworkers running into Eva Mendes out on the streets of Freetown. Talk about random - this is NOT the place you expect to meet celebrities. For the full story, check out Ali's blog.

This past weekend was a "ship holiday," which means the people who work Monday-to-Friday, 9-5 jobs got a 3-day weekend. No surgeries on Friday, and most of the crew went off-ship and took mini-vacations at the beach, chimpanzee sanctuary, traveled up-country, hiked mountains, etc. On Saturday I joined a group of 9 people heading out to Burreh Beach for the day. I always have mixed feelings about going to the beach. After living on a ship and not getting outside much, it's glorious to spend some time outside, breathe some FRESH AIR (it usually smells like garbage or sewage out on the dock), and soak in some sunshine. However, it's always a bit of a stressful ordeal actually GETTING to the beach, and the bigger the group, the harder it is. Sarah and I got some phone numbers of taxi drivers and she called to find someone who would be willing to come pick us up, drive us to the beach, and then bring us back to the ship at the end of the day. After calling a few numbers we thought someone might show up the next morning...but we weren't really sure. Language barriers always make things interesting. Oh well, we could always just walk up the road and flag one down. Saturday morning the nine of us gathered together, swimsuits on and backpacks full of snacks and books. As soon as we walked through the metal gate and left the dock area, a taxi driver ran up and informed us that he was the driver we'd called earlier. However, he only had one taxi, and we needed 2 for our group. He had also changed the price we had agreed on over the phone, and decided we were going to a different beach, one closer to town. Over the next frustrating half hour we haggled back and forth, eventually coming to a price everybody agreed upon and getting a second taxi. I squeezed into the back seat of one with 3 other girls and our backpacks, and we started the hour-long drive through Freetown and out into the countryside. We were enjoying the pretty scenery out in the country when our driver suddenly said "do you recognize this area? Are we going the right way?" Jess responded, "we don't know - YOU'RE the driver!" Apparently he didn't actually know how to get to the beach we were going to - a fact he failed to mention earlier. So he pulled over, asked directions, and we eventually made it to Burreh. Once we actually arrived, it was a lovely day. We met up with some other nurses and day volunteers who were already there, and spent a few hours swimming in clean, emerald water and lying in the sun. Toward the end of the day I was having a second swim when dark clouds rolled in over the mountains, the water got choppy, and the rain started to pour. The rain was cold, making the sea water feel really warm. There's something unique about swimming in the rain off the coast of West Africa. We tried to wait for the rain to stop before leaving, but it showed no sign of letting up and it was time for us to go. So we gathered our now-sopping belongings, hiked up the path through the downpour to where the taxis were waiting, and squished back in. The windows immediately fogged up, but that didn't stop the driver from zooming back out onto the road. We asked "um, can you see alright?" To which he responded curtly "I can see." We looked at each other nervously, prayed, and hoped for the best. After awhile the windows cleared up, the rain stopped, and we all made it back to the ship in one piece.

Max-fax patients

A couple of weeks ago I got to spend a few hours in the operating rooms, observing various surgeries. I went back and forth between the max-fax, ENT, and plastics rooms, but spent the majority of my time in the max-fax room. I watched Dr. Gary remove a massive bony tumor that I think was caused by fibrous dysplasia. During the next several days, I had the priviledge of being the nurse assigned to the spunky eleven-year-old girl, Comfort, whose surgery I watched. Comfort usually had a smile on her face, especially after I took out her feeding tube and let her start eating real food again. She liked to hold and play with the babies on the ward, sing and clap with us during ward worship, and take pictures whenever the photographer came through.
Comfort and her sister are staying at the Hope Center now, and will be going home to Liberia (I think - maybe it's Nigeria, I'm not sure) in a few days. Pray that the tumor doesn't come back, and that Comfort regains normal muscle control as the swelling goes down.

We've been enjoying all the babies we've had on the ward lately:

Babies!