Weekend in Ooty

Monday 22^nd August

The internet is working (yay!) so I thought I would take advantage of it, but unfortunately I cannot write for too long as we are cooking dinner for 23 people this evening! Its Monday and we spent a pleasant, but cold weekend in Ooty which is about an hour and a half from Gudalur, UP the mountains…so it was cold!! Ooty was fine…its famous India-wide for its homemade chocolate which is good…not nearly as good as what we can get in England – but much better than the fake dairy milk (in the exact dairy milk packaging, but doesn’t taste like dairy milk) that you can buy in Gudalur. So we profited from that. We also went out for dinner to a fancy hotel and I ate steak. It satisfied my meat craving so I was happy! It was the first meat that I have had since coming to India and it was oh so good J

On Sunday, we took the ‘minature train’ from Ooty to a town about an hour away called Coonoor, just for the amazing views over the mountains, which we had read about.

Will post photos later - internet too slow!

Mona and I also had a great time hanging out the windows, which you can’t do on trains in England!

Our whole carriage consisted of us and a massive group of Indian tourists who made their fondness of tunnels very clear by shouting and whooping every time we went through one..it was really funny and we had a good time getting involved!

The journey back from Ooty was fine, the kid behind me threw up consistently through the window, but I felt more sorry for the man by the window behind the kid! Ugh…

We were back in Gudalur by 6 so watched Mamma Mia, the movie. Good times!

Today we had outpatients clinic which was varied, as always. Just to give you an idea of how much variation between specialities and patients there is, I made a list of the first 10 patients that we saw:

1.      Infected scrotal abscess (Urology)

2.      Dacrocystitis (Ophthalmology)

3.      Rectal prolapse (The most disgusting thing ever)

4.      Secondary Infertility (O & G/ Fertility)

5.      COPD (Respiratory medicine)

6.      2 year old child with delayed milestones and microcephaly (Paediatrics)

7.      Really, really bad Diabetic Foot Ulcers (Endocrinology)

8.      Osteoarthritis (Orthopaedics)

9.      Renal Cell Carcinoma (Nephrology/Oncology)

10.  Gout

Told you it was varied! We also managed to recruit quite a few pregnant ladies to our study, which was good. The scrotal abscess needed debridement as it was very necrotic from the infection and we observed this. It was done under sedation, not anaesthetic and we felt very sorry for the man’s poor scrotum!

So I have to go now as we are cooking dinner tonight for many, many people! We wanted to have a dinner to say thank you to Dr Shyla and Dr Nandukumar and some of the staff of the hospital who have helped us and taught us a great deal and who made us feel so welcome while we have been here. Turns out, that has been quite a few people so we have a lot of food to cook! Luckily, Duana is keen to be in charge of the main meal, Dr Alice and her boyfriend Alan who is visiting from the UK are making refrigerator cake for dessert (I’m really looking forward to that!) and I am in charge of Guacamole and tortilla chips. I had a hard time getting hold of avocados and had to substitute potato chips for the Doritos, but I managed to get all my ingredients, so need to go and make it quickly before the guests arrive!

Bye!