Our first week in India

DAY 1
Well I arrived in Mumbai safe and sound! Flying in was amazing as the whole city was lit up and it's huge! The first thing I noticed on landing in Mumbai was the smog and the smell!! The airport terminals were full, even at 2am so our plane didn't have a terminal to pull into. We had to park some distance from the terminal and they sent out buses, which took us to the terminal.

The drive through Mumbai to the guesthouse was definitely an experience!! There are no road rules except toot loudly so people know you are coming. They have multiple traffic lights, which they just ignore, tooting as they go.

After arriving in Malvali we went to the next town called Lonavala on the train. The town is quite noisy with people tooting all the time and with no footpaths it's a battle not to get run over!

Otherwise just sat around & waited for the others to catch us up in Malvali.

DAY 2
We went into Lonavala again with the second group of Antips arrivals as some people hadn't been there yet.

After wandering around Lonavala for a while we got back on the train and headed back to Malavali and just sat around getting to know each other seeing as we are spending the next 4 weeks together!

We had our orientation and we are off to the local hospital in Lonavala to observe a clinic, pharmacy and maybe some surgeries!

DAY 3
Had vegemite on toast this morning for breakfast! The lady here cooked us toast and I brought a tube of vegemite so we had a feast!

Caught the train again which is always an experience. The Indian people are all so pushy when getting on and off and these trains are no-where near as crowded as the ones in Mumbai!

The consultant surgeon at the hospital (Dr Shaa) is very famous and a very good doctor. The three of us spent a couple of hours in the Outpatient Clinic with Dr Shaa. It was a tiny little room with a desk & a examining table & a couple of chairs. Adjoining it was what looked like an ensuite bathroom & turned out to be the drug room. There were 3 doctors present for the appointments, Dr Shaa was the senior doctor & he had two junior doctors who did all his paperwork and script writing. He just did the incredibly brief 'examination'. There was also a nurse or 'sister' who took blood pressures and gave injections.

We then went on a tour of the hospital. It has 25 ward beds split into male and female wards. There is a nurse in each ward. They had equipment like IVs and monitoring equipment but it was ancient! It all looked so old and worn out. They also have an ancient x-ray & ultrasound machine as well as a tiny operating theatre, which was also ancient technology! They do really sophisticated surgeries too considering the surroundings.

DAY 4
We went to the hospital in Lonavala again and sat in on the outpatient clinic with Doctor Shaa again.

After lunch we went and watched the afternoon surgery list, which was really interesting. We saw a circumcision, 2 hysterectomies and a lumpectomy (breast lump removal), which were all really interesting to watch, as I hadn't seen them before in Australia. I have no idea if the procedures here are the same as in Aus. It was fairly hygienic though in some ways. It was just really basic. The funniest thing that happened was the power went off (which is apparently a common occurrence) during the middle of the circumcision and the anaesthetist got his mobile phone out and tried to use it as light. The other junior doctors all had to run down to wherever the generator was and get it going. They still carried on the surgery though in the dim light!

DAY 5
We met the local neurosurgeon who had come down from his hospital near Pune. He is good friends with Dr Shaa and had come down to Lonavala as a favour to do a surgery for a family who could not afford to go to Pune to have it done.

After the consultations we went straight up to watch the neurosurgery. We watched him remove the piece of skull from a guy’s head, which had become infected. After that we had lunch and then headed back up to the surgery and watched a hernia repair on a young girl.

DAY 6
Headed over to Lonavala again. Our train was 20 minutes late this morning, which is the worst it has been so far. Overall I have been very impressed with the Indian rail system so far. I guess that may change once we start going longer distances!!

When we got to the outpatient department we were later than the other days and one of the junior doctors remarked that we were late. India runs on something called IST or Indian Stretchable Time, which basically means that everyone runs 15-20mins behind time and no one thinks anything of it. So for the doctors to remark that we were late today means we really must have been!!

We watched all the consultations again. The most interesting was a boy who had been bitten by a dog and was there to have rabies vaccines.

Once clinic finished we discovered that there weren't any surgeries for the rest of the day so we had a really short day, which was awesome for a Friday!!

This weekend we've decided to go Pune so that should be fun! Next week we're going on the mobile health vans so that should be fun!

From, Katrina