Surgery safari

I'm sitting just below this map of the plastic surgery outreach camps waiting for a long and complex operation to finish before we head off to the closest camp in Bharatpur. It is around 150km south west from Kathmandu (the closest pin on the map) and is right next to the Chitwan national park, where the elephants and royal bengal tigers live. It's not so much a surgical outreach "camp" but more like a team of surgeons visiting another hospital in a nearby city - according to wikipedia it has a population of 143,000. As far as I understand, there are local "scouts" in each of the areas on the map whose job it is to round up suitable patients for surgery. Then the team (one surgeon and one scrub nurse) arrives and they work their way down the waiting list.

The trip was planned (as much as "planned" happens in Nepal) for yesterday until Monday, but then there was an ameloblastoma to operate on. This started at 10am this morning and is still going on at 1715 - they are about to start the microvascular anastomosis so it's likely we won't leave for a while yet!

Time for a nap on the consulting couch...