No we have not disappeared to the ends of the earth or gone missing. It has been many months since we updated the blog mainly because of the demands of residency and taking care of three very active children but don’t worry we’re doing well…maybe I should rephrase that…surviving my second month of all night shifts in the ED.
A quick overview of the last few months:
- Vivek is now 9 months old, we cannot believe how interactive he has become
- Karuna and Luke started their second year of homeschooling and are loving every minute of it
- I finished one month of night shifts in the ER, a month of day shifts in the ER, a month in the ER at Baylor Dallas and am now on a second month of nights at Parkland/Childrens
- Melissa helped to start up a Side by Side chapter in Dallas three weeks ago and they are going through the book Sacred Marriage
- We harvested our crops from the past year incluiding 4 honey dew melons, lots of raspberries (they are still bearing for us) and strawberries, and ate our first pomegranate from our tree
- I traveled to Boston for a week to attend the annual American College of Emergency Medicine conference
- We traveled to Nebraska for a week to visit Melissa’s family
Read more…
Daily Living, Family, Medicine, Missions, Pictures, Residency
We are still working hard on getting projects done around the house before Christo starts his residency orientation on June 22nd. The big things we have done so far have been to put in new ceiling fans in all the rooms (did you know that a ceiling can make a room feel 10 degrees cooler and uses a fraction of the energy compared to running an AC unit?), picking out applicances for the home, putting in new programmable thermostats to make our AC unit run more efficiently, and putting in wood blinds throughout the house. Our big project that we started tackling today has been adding built-in bookshelves similar to the ones we had in Rochester because we still have hundreds of books and right now nowhere to put them. We hope this project will be finished by this weekend so that we can tackle our next project of painting the house followed by landscaping work for the third week. Read more…
Daily Living, Family, Medicine, Missions, Pictures, Travel
Just wanted to give all of you a quick summary of our trip back to the US and our first few days back in America. We left Makunda last Wednesday to start our journey home back to the US. Before our departure, the staff at Makunda threw us a wonderful farewell potluck dinner and so we were able to visit with most of the campus families before we left. We were sad to leave so many new friends who have such a passion for serving Christ through medical missions work but we we were consoled with the thought that we will soon be able to return to India to labor with them to reach people with the Gospel. Read more…
Daily Living, Medicine, Missions, Pictures, Travel
Because of the problems we had with our internet connection, we were not able to put up this post from Melissa. Continue to lift up Luke in your prayers as he has still been suffering from diarrhea. The kids are having a difficult time with jet lag…they were up this morning about 1:30 AM. We hope that they will be able to re-time their body clocks soon. We’ve also put up some pictures from our third week along with this post. Read more…
Medicine, Missions, Pictures, Travel
Just a quick post to let all of you know that we have arrived safely back in Rochester around 4 PM this afternoon. God blessed us with a good travel experience and the kids did well although they have both crashed for the evening. Please continue to lift us up in your prayers as we get over jet lag, get ready for graduation and move to Texas in the next four days! We’ll write more when we get a little more sleep. Just in case you were wondering…it seems that the server that was hosting our pictures has gone offline and so you might have gotten a page not found error when you clicked on the picture galleries. I moved all our pictures to another server and so they should be working again. Just let us know if you cannot view the picture galleries again.
Missions, Travel
Another week has passed and we now down to less than a week at Makunda before we leave here for Delhi on Saturday and then return to the US on Tuesday. It has been a good week at Makunda with time to talk with other families on campus and to get their perspectives on mission work in India.
Monday was an extremely busy day in the outpatient clinic where we saw 290 patients! Even with the extra help provided by the return of Dr. Vijay and Dr. Ann, we felt that we could hardly keep up with the extra number of patients who were here. I have to think that the patients must somehow know how many doctors will be working on a particular day and tailor the number of people who visit the clinic accordingly. Regardless, I thought seeing that many patients in a day did them a disservice and wore out the staff to the point of sheer exhaustion but it is so difficult to do anything else because how do you turn away so many people who have traveled anywhere from 2-8 hours for the chance to see a doctor? One of the things that we’ve talked with several of the healthcare providers here about was having nurses help see patients as well and then for them to refer more complicated patients to physicians so that the workload would be more manageable and so that each patient would get more than the 2-5 minutes we can give them at the current pace. Read more…
Daily Living, Medicine, Missions, Travel
Sorry for the long post. Our internet access is really limited and so I’ll put all of last week’s post in one big post. There are also some pictures from our time at ACA and in Kolkata that can be found on the bottom of this post.
It’s hard to believe that another week has passed and that we are more than half way through our stay here at Makunda. This has been a challenging week as we have thought much about what medical missions should look like and how to balance the demands of work, ministry and time with family.
Monday of this week was an exciting day because some of the other physicians who work here had come back from their vacation. Dr. Shilini, the OB/GYN doctor returned to a full labor ward and Dr. Harry and Amanda McNaughton (missionary physicians from New Zealand) returned from their trip to Shilong. Read more…
Daily Living, Medicine, Missions, Pictures, Travel
We have not had internet access for more than a week (for that matter no electricity or phones) and so I’ve been journaling every couple of days and now that we have are at an internet café I’ll post the journal entries under the day they were written and thus you’ll see several entries from the last week…just didn’t want to confuse anybody. You can start reading the new entries from the one titled “ACA” and then work forwards up to the latest entry titled “The Weekend.”
On Friday we conducted the OPD in breakneck speed as usual and topped the 215 mark. We had several TB patients admitted on Friday including two patients who had been having fevers and night sweats for over a month. Read more…
Daily Living, Medicine, Missions, Pictures, Travel
Today was another typical day at Makunda during which we saw 203 outpatients and performed two surgeries in the evening as well as a couple of D&Cs. We admitted another baby overnight into the ICU with pneumonia. The baby was quite fussy throughout the day but hopefully will turn the corner soon. Unlike the baby we admitted the day before with pneumonia, this baby does not seem to have heart failure as a consequence of her pneumonia.
We had another patient with malaria admitted yesterday as well. Malaria season is just starting in the area because the rains have begun (we’ve been getting torrential downpours every 1-2 days and thus we still have not had electricity for more than a few hours since we have arrived). Because of the rain, there is plenty of space for mosquitoes to breed and thus the higher incidence of malaria over the next few months. Read more…
Daily Living, Medicine, Missions
Wednesday was another interesting day at the hospital. The OPD was relatively slower compared to the number of people we saw on Tuesday. We probably saw around 150 patients on Wednesday. We’ve been trying as hard as possible to learn Hindi/Bengali/Tribal Languages but it has been difficult because we’re learning some words from each language and some patients only know one out of the three. Both of us continue to see how important it will be for us to learn the language once we return to India so that it can facilitate our ability to talk with patients, students and neighbors alike. Read more…
Daily Living, Medicine, Missions