Universitas Day 1


Today was my first day at the Universitas Hospital, because I was unable to attend yesterday due to being sick. When I arrived, I waited awhile for one of the dieticians, Will, to come get me and show me around and to see his patients. He mainly works with patients that have cardiovascular problems. We ran (yes, we actually almost ran because he walks so fast) around the hospital to his different patients. On these rounds I learned that in South Africa they use either an elemental feed or semi-elemental feed in their feedings tubes, and this means that the feed has amino acids instead of protein and glucose instead of carbohydrates.
One of the patients we met with was a woman who was about to be discharged, so Will explained to her how to make her own TPN feeding to inject into herself because she would no longer have the machine to do it for her. I helped with this demonstration. The powder feed smelled very good, oddly, but I did not taste it. We also visited the kitchen for a bit. During this time I looked around and helped him retrieve the feed bags to give to the same patient that we did the demonstration for. We were going to give them to her to bring home for herself. She would have two weeks worth of feeding and then need to come back after those two weeks to retrieve more.
After being with Will, I met with Marli, another dietician. The two of us, and the other two dietetic students (Sarah and Janke), had a small mini-lecture. During which she talked about many things, most of which were things that the two UFS students would have to know about for an examination they are going to take. I learned quite a bit! One of the things that stuck out to me was her talk about refeeding syndrome. This is when a patient that is malnourished, or something of the sort and along those lines, is reintroduced to food much too quickly. This is the reason why dieticians issue weening bags to certain patients, because these help to slowly reintroduce foods to the patient. In addition to this she also discussed dumping syndrome to us, which is when someone, very soon after gastric surgery, eats too much and their insulin spikes. The symptoms include fever, dizziness, sweats, etc. Things such as meals that are too large, too sugary, and/or having fluid with your meal can cause the dumping syndrome.
After our mini-lecture, we sat in an hour long meeting with some of the doctors and other staff at the hospital. They discussed patients, what their diseases could possibly be, they ways in which they were going to handle them, etc. It was very interesting to listen to, and I was very glad because it was in English! The diseases discussed included cirrhosis, pneumonia, and cancer.
To conclude the day, Marli informed me that on Thursday morning she is going to give me and the other dietetic students a quiz on diseases of the liver and inflammatory bowel disease. I hope I do okay! I need to study because I feel like we have learned some different things from the students here at UFS so I might be a bit behind. Wish me luck!