The past few days at the Big Daddy Maharat Hospital have been nothing short of awesome.  We were there Monday through Wednesday.  Two words- Operating Room… the entire time!!

This is a huge hospital.  It has all the specialists, so it’s where all of the complicated and high risk stuff goes to (not just for OB, but for everything).  It has 1500 beds, and that’s still not enough.  The Emergency Department waiting room looks like the waiting room of our county hospitals- filled to the brim.

I spent the whole time in labor and delivery.  It has separate labor and delivery rooms too, but more beds in each.  They also do routine episiotomy and no epidurals.  C-sections get general anesthesia (they can choose to have a c-section even without an indication and a lot of women do so they can not have to go through an epiduralless birth).  I got do primary some c-sections (some of them for breech presentation) and tubal ligations, and I assisted my fellow residents on several more.  The midwives do the vaginal deliveries, so we didn’t help with those (we get enough of those at home base to feel comfortable with them).

There are 4 ORs- one for c-sections, two for major operations like hysterectomies, and one for minor procedures like D&Cs and tubal ligations.  We had two at a time scrubbed into the c-section OR, and the third person would observe in a major case OR (that the OB/Gyn residents were working on), or be working in the minor surgery OR.

Everyone, as usual, was so friendly and eager to teach us and let us operate.  We had a different faculty each day.  No complaints about any of them.  We were with the same scrub tech every day.  She was amazing.  She could do that surgery in her sleep.  She has been a c-section scrub tech for over 20 years.  She never got frustrated or impatient with us, and she helped us every step of the way. She considered us her little surgery babies.  She would teach us different instrument handling techniques that she’s seen over the years and tell us “good ferran (white person)” when we’d get it down.

Monday night we had a banquet dinner here at the hotel to kick off the Global Health Conference.  We had a group of women do traditional Thai dances for us for entertainment.  They were all so beautiful.  At the end of the night they had the ferrans get up and dance with them.  It was comical to watch us.

Tuesday night the deans of the medical school took us to dinner at a restaurant close by.  They have all been so great at getting us taken care of.

Tonight we’re going to a restaurant that one of the family medicine staff’s brother owns.  He studied culinary art in France.  Don’t know if we’re having French or Thai food, but I’m happy with either.

We leave for another locale tomorrow, so I will update Friday afternoon with how that goes.  I’m sure it’ll be just as good as the last two locations.  It’s more of a community hospital, like the one in Prathai.  We will be at another big hospital next week before we make the voyage to Chang Rai.