Jobs Around the Hospital

My resume is expanding every day. In the ENT clinic I have worked my way up the ladder from janitor to scrub tech. I started out mostly as an observer, watching my dad and Dr. Aboiyar see patients and occasionally getting to look in a patient’s ear. After a couple of weeks I started organizing the stockroom, which turned into a much longer project than I was expecting. The building in which the ENT clinic is currently located was not actually built until after Dr. Anthis left, so all of the ENT supplies were moved over later. Junk and medical supplies were haphazardly jumbled together on the shelves and allowed to accumulate three years of harmatan dust. After one month of dusting, sorting, organizing, and labeling, the stockroom finally started to look orderly. Much remains to be sorted, but the organization is at a stopping point until the ENT clinic gets some shelving for the office and theatre.

Shortly after I finished organizing the stockroom, a visiting dentist named Dr. Maxwell asked for my help in the dental clinic. I observed more than helped, but I learned how to read X-rays and got to take out a tooth that Dr. Maxwell had already worked loose. I observed tooth fillings, root canals, and complicated wisdom tooth extractions. I learned how to make mouth molds, how to do an effective nerve block to numb one side of the mouth, and how to extract difficult molar
After a week in the dental clinic I returned to the ENT department. ENT runs four days a week: Monday is theatre day, Tuesdays and Fridays are clinic days, and Wednesday is set aside for audiograms. During my first couple of months in the clinic I was organizing on clinic days and just observing on theatre and audiogram days. Not so anymore! Wednesdays are becoming my busiest days of the week ever since I have been trained to do audiograms. I now do most of the audiograms at Evangel Hospital, freeing the other ENT employees to get other things done around the clinic.

Mondays have also been getting busier since ENT was given two operating rooms instead of one. I am present for most ENT surgery days because I am the department’s only circulating nurse. Every Monday I walk through the waiting room to the changing room passing rows of mothers holding newborn babies bundled up heavily with knitted hats and sweaters despite the heat; in addition to being ENT theatre day, Monday is circumcision day. Circumcisions were done in the second operating room (we would hear babies screaming all day long from next door), but since the ENT operating schedule is getting more and more packed, ENT took over the additional room. Now Dad and Dr. Aboiyar jump back and forth between the two rooms, with anesthesia getting the next patient ready so that they can begin immediately when one case is closed. Sometimes they even split up, with one operating in the first room and the other operating in the second. In order to enable this arrangement I am being trained as a scrub nurse. So far I have assisted on some minor procedures and a couple of tympanoplasties. On the most recent tympanoplasty I even got to suture the skin when the case was over.

I am getting a lot of medical experience here that I would not have had the opportunity to get in America until much later in my training. Every month that I am here the list of jobs on my resume gets longer: stockroom organizer, dental assistant, audiologist, circulating nurse, and scrub tech. I have passed through a lot of job titles, but I like the one that our driver Alphonsus gave me the best. He just calls me “Small Doctor.”

Emily Mitchell, 19