A+E and sleeping in Kakum rainforest!

Hello everyone :) Happy July. I have recently put photos up on Facebook, feel free to look through them!

I finished my 4 week main placement on the paediatric ward last Friday. This week I have been in the Accident and Emergency department, and it is definitely an interesting experience but not particularly one I would want to repeat! It is so so busy, with a constant queue of people waiting to be seen, some really ill and some not so ill. I haven't quite got it figured out yet but there does not seem to be much of a system as to how it works. There is no way of 'sorting through' how ill people are (in the UK this is known as triage) which means (apart from the really ill people who get carried in by family either unconscious or convulsing or nearly dead) that ill or really in pain people who need urgent attention don't get it, as they have to wait their turn in the queue behind someone who may have come in because they have a nosebleed or a cold. Which is frustrating because people who need help deteriorate quickly and don't get the urgent medical attention they need.

Things commonly seen in A+E here are malaria, severe dehydration (to the point of collapse), burns, convulsions/coma due to diabetes (when it is poorly controlled this can be a result of high blood sugar), and a LOT of injuries due to road traffic accidents which are pretty common here. There is no monitoring equipment here, no resuscitation equipment and the only oxygen available (given through tiny nasal prongs which wouldn't really help in an emergency anyway!) is from a cannister that often gets used up and not filled up again, so when it is needed it is empty. One man yesterday was really ill and he stopped breathing on a number of occasions, and no one would give him oxygen as they thought it was a 'waste' and should be kept for someone that needed it. Only after explaining to the Sister and a medical student that this man definitely needed oxygen was I allowed to put it on him! On my first day (Monday) a prisoner was brought in unconscious by another prisoner, accompanied by two prison guards (who looked a bit scary in their massive boots and uniforms) who were asked by the doctor to talk to him in his office, which left both prisoners unattended standing in the middle of a very hectic A+E department. This was a little terrifying but no one else seemed to be bothered...apparently this is fairly normal! But the staff in A+E are amazing and do the best they can with the limited resources.

At the weekend six other girls from the house and I visited Cape Coast, a small city one hour east along the coast from Takoradi. We stayed at a questionable guesthouse on Friday night, and on Saturday visited the huge and amazing Cape Coast Castle, where they use to keep slaves captured and deport them in the slave trading years. We went down to the dungeons and cells and it was actually quite scary! Was so interesting though and made the awfulness of the slave trade feel really 'real'.

Saturday afternoon we traveled another hour up to Kakum National Park, a vast rainforest which is a big tourist attraction in Ghana. We slept overnight on 'tree platforms' which was literally 3 half walls, a tin roof and a mattress with a holey mosquito net in the middle of the forest with no-one but us around...a tad scary! It was an interesting experience to say the least and glad I did it but probably wouldn't choose to do it again! There were a HUGE amount of soldier ants, which are giant ants with fangs and bite you and cling onto you and get inside your shoes, not so nice. Also spiders, millipedes and a most unwelcome mouse in the middle of the night! When I say slept, we decided to stay up all night, but eventually fell asleep in the pitch black at midnight to the very noisy sounds of lots and lots of insects and monkeys and other things we had no clue of. However we woke up an hour later to find a mouse amongst us... Fun!! Sunday morning at 5.30am we did the 'canopy walk' which is an pretty scary but amazing walk along treetops in the middle of the forest and saw loads of monkeys and birds, was so beautiful and well worth staying overnight for!

Everyone here doesn't stop talking about the World Cup (I have had a few comments about being English and rubbish at football from people and had to hang my head in shame), but whenever Ghana has got through there are huge street parties and so much celebrating it's amazing!

Lots of love from Ella xx