Hi all, Missy Elliott here to carry on Dr Drea's good work and hopefully cover everything from the past few weeks without sending you to sleep!

Last week was spent on surgery with a fantastic surgeon! Unfortunately, and very ironically, he's the only government surgeon in this district AND he has Parkinson's disease. He's the cliche surgeon with the tremor that noone in the UK would want working on them. Seen some pretty savage burns, neck surgery and abdominal surgery with him - one man had a piece of his bowel removed because it had expanded to about 10cm in diameter. (this is not ideal). The surgeon is notoriously hard to understand and adds "y" to the end of every word ( so left becomes lefty), which is usually not a problem when you're writing in the notes but one morning Andie was transcribing the sentence "blood and pus discharge" and it all went very wrong! I'll let you work out the rest!

The theatres here are surreal - more like a horror movie set than anything.

Last sunday, we went to the local church at 730am (!!!) for sunday service which was great as the choir were fab. The vicar's singing sounded like a dying cat and it was 2 hours of pure Kiswahili but overall it was fun. Later, we took piki piki's (motorbikes) up to a local convent (it turned out to be a pretty holy day for some unholy people). And we found a lovely little Welsh nun who had been there for 10 years! I could see why though because it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen! The convent itself looked like a manor house in Tuscany - all white stones with great views of the plains and mountains. It was total wellbeing! Sister Gyneth was very funny, she blaphemed A LOT.

Monday was another incredible day spent with the Palliative Care team here at the hospital on their outreach programme. We spent the morning offroading through the bush in their landrover! However, the doctor was on leave this week so this left Andie and I as the "doctors". Subideal. So, armed with our trusty oxford clinical handbook (thank you MDU) we tried, with Sister Harriet the palliative care nurse, to find the best treatment for the patients. A lot of them were HIV positive, and there were a few patients with cancer. A few were quite difficult cases, especially with a translated history and quick examination, but we tried our best to find some drugs, and dosages, that would help and that were available in the landrover! There are only a limited number and type of drug available as you can imagine! So after a morning of this, we jumped back into the landrover - but the adventure wasn't over yet!!

We came across a young pregnant woman walking along the track and piled her into the jeep with us! She was in total agony, with her contractions combined with the jolting of the jeep. I was sat in the back of the jeep, timing this woman's contractions, trying to work out the position of the fetus while the driver absolutely caned it through the villages, almost killing a few village children in the process. I really wished I had listened more on Obs and Gynae placement! - I was trying to work out what we would have to do if we had to deliver her in bush, but I really wasn't coming up with any ideas! Luckily, we arrived at the hospital in time and when she wasn't in the jeep, her contractions slowed and she stopped crying. Maybe I should have done what the midewives here do - slap the woman if she screams too much!

Missy out!