Last evening, shortly after I returned home from the hospital, one of my neighbors came running over to my house in a panic. Her nephew had apparently fallen while trying to pull a guava down from a tree, and badly cut his wrist on a piece of glass. When I looked at the boy, who was 12 years old, he had a deep cut and obviously needed to get to the hospital. With a tourniquet wrapped around his arm, I drove them to the hospital where things were quiet, and he was able to get cleaned up and sutured immediately, and he seems to be doing fine.

Today, I worked with Dr. Pott in the OR. We amputated a diabetic woman's finger, which had turned black and was oozing pus from a month-long infection -- not a very different scenario from many diabetic patients I've seen in the States. We had 2 other minor surgeries, one of which was a lymph node biopsy, and Dr. Pott let me do the incision, most of the dissecting, and the suturing. Exciting!

This afternoon Dr. Medieros, a breast surgeon at Rochester General Hospital, gave a teaching session on breast cancer to medical staff, via teleconferencing. The group was small, but people were grateful and found the session valuable.