Return to Africa.

This coming May I will be returning to Nairobi with a team of people to do open heart surgery on children there. This will be my third such trip having been before in 2007 and 2008.

My role will be to help set up an improvised Paediatric Intensive Care Unit on ward 4b in the Kenyatta National Hospital and to care for children following their heart operation.

The picture above was of first impressions taken by me in 2007 when we very first arrived on the unit we were to use. The electric bar fire was an improvised attempt at an incubator! The hurricane lamp was the emergency lighting. The ventilators were pretty good though. The monitors were clunky old Hewlett Packard monitors which I recall using twenty years ago - they're outdated but effective. Lab facilities were pretty minimal so we had to rely on our own clinical judgment a lot. It was a real privilege to be part of this whole enterprise organised by MEAK (Medical & Educational Aid to Kenya).

During our time there we did over twenty operations. My proudest moment came last year when I improvised a means of giving peritoneal dialysis to one of our patients with my own homemade brew of dialysis fluid! He was very ill and went into acute renal failure. The advantage of taking a dinosaur like me along is that I remember how we used to have to do things here 15-20 years ago.

We fly out on 15th May and return on 24th. If I can I'll try and post a couple of blogs describing our adventure there - but the photos might have to wait until I'm back in the UK!