Xmas at Mseleni

It was the hottest Christmas I had ever experienced.
The air was thick and pungent, the heat was a bit disconcerting and the A&E was rife with every creatures from two to eight legs.
Christmas was only around the corner, so to celebrate in true Mseleni style, at 4pm when starting my Christmas weekend oncall, I received a deathly looking baby from the ambulance that had pitched up.
The poor creature was only 3 days new and had its Zulu style natural selection contest imposed on it in the form of traditional witch doctor medication/poison. The cultural norm, by the grannies mainly, is to give a traditional potent poison orally or if your lucky as an enema that has been bought from the local witch doctor.
My heart sank but I went to auto pilot having been through this scenario many times already - resuscitation, rehydration, replacement glucose and managing multiorgan failure - mainly kidney and liver failure.
Three hours later, baby was no better but no worse, no referral centres wanted the child, the potassium was incompatible with life and I was very openly expressing my disdain at the mother who I was unsure about how much English she could comprehend but spent a lot of time looking down and sheepish.

That night I delivered a cute little boy and the following morning an adorable little girl - The Christmas baby! The midwives have a very cute tradition whereby they place the baby in cot and adorn it in money and then wheel it all over the hospital whilst singing a festive Zulu song and trying to sponge money off anyone around. It was definitely a jovial sight. But my favourite remains the morning prayer songs which are actually carried out every morning but obviously on christmas they are more flavoured for the Christmas theme and generally very beautiful to listen too. So Christmas singing began whilst I pottered around trying to rounds having been already since 5am.

Later that day I gave out my stash of chocolates for the wards, the were received expectantly and gratefully though. After clearing the morning A&E load of patients, a group of us headed towards the paediatric ward - it was time for giving out the presents to the kids on the ward. We had been preparing for this for a few weeks, having wrapped them all meticulously a few nights ago and now selecting the appropriate clientele for toys from mimic Barbie dolls to chess sets and fake nail kits! The medical students were the distributers and myself and another doc were the Christmas photographers. Immortalising the Christmas faces of Mseleni children's ward. It went down pretty well, from a few happy kids to couple of puzzled toddlers, many grateful mothers and ecstatic nurses who were fighting over the girly nail kit!

After father Christmas duties we all set off to prepare our own surrogate family Christmas dinner, a few doctors, a few medical students an OT and a dog - one big surrogate family. Fake spray snow on windows, Christmas crackers, halal roast chicken, gravy and lots of cheesy Christmas music - it was a pretty fine layout.
Just as we sat down to eat, my dear friend who is a fellow GP trainee from the UK and also the biggest shit magnet when it comes to oncalls, barely sat down, when off went the mobile - EMERGENCY in labour ward - fitting pregnant women.
We were all very unsurprised, she ran off like a shot and we sighed and then tucked in to late lunch mercilessly.

All in all a fine summery Christmas day.

PS The lady didn't have a fit on labour ward, just a twitch ;)