Ward 4A

                Is rounding at the national Ugandan hospital supposed to make you a germophobe?  Well, after rounding on Ward 4A, the Infectious Disease Ward, I definitely wanted to crawl into a bubble to avoid all of the disease and sickness that surrounded me.  On the ward, there are tons of sick people everywhere – lying in a bed, walking around, and sitting/lying on the ground.  As compared to the University Hospital in Colorado which has all private rooms, the idea of private rooms is a completely foreign concept at Mulago.  Instead, there are three partitioned spaces that hold 12-20 patients in each.  The beds are about 3 feet from each other – usually just enough space for their family members to lay out the bed mats they will sleep on as their loved ones hope to be treated.  Even the tuberculosis patients, who would be under airborne isolation in the US, are amongst the other patients with only an open window nearby that the doctors hope will prevent further transmission of TB. 

                Although the entire space is rather disgusting, it was the walls that bothered me the most.  You can see that beneath the peeling yellow paint, suspicious yellow, brown, and green spots cover the walls.  The smell of sickness, body odor, and urine that permeates the ward is only tolerable for so long and the idea that the procedure room is where the dead bodies are also kept, is sickening.  And then you see the patients.  Before when I had gone to the ward, I wasn’t too rattled by the end.  This time, I was bothered a bit more.  I don’t know exactly what changed.  Maybe because my roommate and I had just discussed how many of the patients on this ward die, I saw these patients in a new light and had a better understanding of the gravity of their illnesses.  Maybe it was because we began by visiting a man who was so sick he couldn’t maintain consciousness for more than 10-20 seconds at a time.  Maybe it was the dying patients who stared into my eyes as they were discussing their status.  Regardless, although I really did have much work to do, I happily (and quickly) escaped the disease-ridden hospital to return to the semi-sterile environment of the lab.  I work in the lab with these patient samples all the time; however, it is often easy to lose sight of where they are actually coming from.  Rounding reminds me of the importance of the work we are doing here – and might make me feel a little germophobic.