It was the time of the preacher
In the year of '01
Now the lesson is over
And the killing's begun
It is a drag, but sometimes patients die after surgery. When this happens, I question every aspect of our care to try to understand why the death occurred. We can't undo the past but we can improve the future.
On this trip we had a few deaths including two preoperative deaths- two babies came to the hospital many days after disasters had occurred in their abdomens'. We had planned to operate on both but they died before getting to surgery. Both cases were long shots, but I have seen these occasionally have a happy ending. The irony is that if these two patients had come one hour earlier, they almost certainly would have been postoperative deaths. In the USA, this would result in several inches of quality control/peer review paper. In Nigeria, we can just accept that we tried our best under very difficult circumstances and the patients died.
We have completed 109 surgeries.
