Dr. Chika Dimgba: First time experiences
An excerpt from Tales Of A Life Saver, Amazon KDP.
I would rather rephrase the topic to my first weekend as a
house officer. I reported excitedly to work on a Friday in hopes
that I would resume fully on Monday, but to my greatest shock,
my firm was on a weekend call. The dreaded weekend call that
starts from 8 am on Saturday and ends at 8 am on Monday.
There I was, feeling fresh and cool with myself, not knowing the
enormity of the task ahead of me.
Oh, I forgot to add that I had only two shirts with me. So, I
needed to hurry home and get a few of my clothes that would,
at least, last me through the week.
On arriving, I was told to man the labour ward. In the labour
ward, asides from the odour of liquor that immediately fills
your nostrils, the screams from women in labour is the next
hard thing to miss.
“Doctor, this thing is painful oh!
Please, doctor, give me something for the pain.”
Actually, where I trained we give pain relief to women in labour,
but it was quite different here.
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I simultaneously monitored five women in labour. And it wasn’t
a fun experience. The sixth woman came in with poor
contractions necessitating augmentation of labour.
The most dreadful work in the labour ward is to augment
labour, which entails titrating oxytocin in an infusion at a
particular drop per minute, checking maternal contractions,
and listening to fetal heart rate and to think that I had to use a
fetoscope in this day and age.
Of the six women, three required an episiotomy, and it’s the
job of the house officer to repair the cut. All of these I had to do
in one night. Thankfully, I had already started imagining how to
repair an episiotomy. So, after my "chief" did the first two, I
took on the third and did a great job at it. I was proud of myself.
The nature of my call duty was such that I neither slept nor
took a bath until the evening of the next day.
