it's what's for dinner

One of my favourite faces around the ship is Dr. Ian's. And yes, I did just link to a Wikipedia article about one of our surgeons. We call him Dr. Ian, but his proper title is Baron Professor the Lord McColl of Dulwich, a name you'd hardly think fits the slight, 76-year old man who carries it.

Dr. Ian and I get along swimmingly. For starters, he's hilarious. I don't think I've ever done a ward round with him without hearing one of his jokes; today's dealt with sugarless tea, and I'm afraid, for the sake of you non-medical folk out there, that I can't go into any more detail than that. His longest-running gag, delivered in his dry British accent, invariably comes when I ask about a patient's diet and what they should be fed after surgery. There is a list of standard post-operative diets, and I used to expect him to choose one of these. Clear Liquids. Soft Diet. Regular. Dr. Ian rarely sticks to that list.

Today, we stood at the bedside of a man who just had surgery yesterday. If you're as good with the calendar as I am, you'll be quick to realize that yesterday was Sunday. We don't typically do surgeries on a Sunday. (Something about a day of rest and all that.) But this one was an emergency.

The patient was a middle-aged man who had had surgery on the ship a number of weeks ago to repair a hernia. He went home, thinking he was healed, and thought no more of his problem until the pain came back. It had been such a long time since his operation that he went first to a local hospital. They put in an IV and presented him with the bill, which he paid. They performed an assessment and presented him with another bill. I think he paid that one, too, but eventually his money ran out. At which point he was thrown out into the street.

So he came back to us, and we ran him into the operating room faster than anything gets done here in West Africa. It turns out his hernia had gotten strangulated, and he was in danger of losing a big piece of his intestines and possibly his life. Dr. Ian grinned wryly up at me while he explained what had happened in the OR. When we opened him up, the bowel looked ... well ... let's just say it was the wrong colour. We gave it some TLC and then all of a sudden it was pink again! (Pink, for you aforementioned non-medical folks, is a good colour.)

I paused a moment while I let those details sink in. Sitting up in the bed in front of me was a healthy-looking man, smiling and showing off his incision for our inspection. Just yesterday, his life was in danger, and today he looked like he didn't have a care in the world. I shook my head, laughing at the fact that I still find all this so incredible. The fact that we can take people and pull them back from the edge, open them up and fix what's wrong. That we can do it without charging them money, without threatening to throw them out in the streets. That here on a ship that's docked in the third world, our hospital is providing first-world care.

And speaking of care, the time had come for me to inquire about my patient's diet. Dr. Ian, I asked, biting back a smile in anticipation of his response, what would you like him to eat?

Without skipping a beat, Baron Professor the Lord Ian McColl of Dulwich looked up at me and delivered his standard response.

Well, haggis of course. If you've got it.


A new lease on life, yes. But I'm afraid, for all our first-world medical care, that haggis is the one thing we just can't offer.