x-ray vision

When there's ABBA blaring from the iPod, beds full of supplies and mattresses stacked up high, it can mean only one thing: the end of the outreach is upon us. This year's tie-down is going to be, in a word, a nightmare. I say that in all seriousness. Since the ship is heading to South Africa for the generators to be replaced, this isn't just the usual business of collecting all the supplies and equipment and making sure they don't move when the ship hits a twenty-five degree roll in the middle of the Atlantic. (Repeat after me: I will not set out to sea in a train ferry.) Once the ship reaches South Africa, we're planning on spending anywhere up to six months in dry dock, and that's where the stress comes in.

For those of you who don't actually live on ship, dry dock is where the ship goes into a shipyard and is lifted completely out of the water for repairs and maintenance. It means limited electricity and no air conditioning. For six months. In one of the hottest and most humid cities in South Africa. Do you see where I'm going with this?

We are a hospital, and as such, we have a lot of very sensitive bits of machinery. Things like anesthesia machines, heart monitors, IV pumps, and the list goes on far longer than I care to think about. Not only that, but a huge amount of our supplies can't really survive in the hot and humid. (Fun fact of the day: sutures are on that list. Not-so-fun fact of the day: the OR has more sutures than you've probably ever cared to think about.) One of the wards is going to have some sort of cooling system in place, so we've got to get everything that might go bad in the heat into that ward. All the machinery, all the linens, all the paperwork, all the everything, practically. Into one ward.

All of this creates a jigsaw puzzle far more complicated than my little brain's power, which means that while the patients are still in their beds in A and B Wards and the ORs are still running, we're starting to think about packing up at the other end of the hospital. This is where my office day got exponentially more fun today. As we wandered through the wards looking at what might need to go in "the cool room" (a name I have only just now come up with and hope to sell the rest of the hospital on tomorrow at our seven AM meeting when we sit down to talk all this over yet again), we realized that there were x-ray viewing boxes on the walls of every ward that were going to be taking up a lot of space.

Thankfully, at this point we also realized that our entire x-ray system is digital, and we really only need to leave one or two of them on board for emergencies; the rest could be taken down and donated to local hospitals. Naturally, just doing that simple job wasn't really an option; we needed to pose with them and take ludicrous photos, too.

Hopefully, after tomorrow, the twelve viewing boxes we managed to collect from all over our hospital will be headed off to hospitals and clinics all over Togo, and the scrubbing and emptying and arranging of the wards will continue without a hitch.

Let's not get our hopes too high, shall we? This is, after all, Africa.

(But I heart Africa, so I think everything's going to be okay.)