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Hey folks! This is our blog, I guess. Karthik and I (Erin) are working for 5 months in rural Tamil Nadu, India at a hospital called Tribal Health Initiative. After 6 months back in the US working at an IHS site in New Mexico, we will return here for another 6 months. We hope that this blog will satiate some curiosity about what exactly we are doing, and help keep us connected to ya'll back home. You can read more about the hospital at http://www.tribalhealth.org.

We’ve been at our site for about 2 weeks now. Karthik has jumped right in to rounding on inpatients in the medical ward, taking care of folks with heart failure, an assortment of abscesses, organophosphate poisoning, and even a viper bite. Karthik has also been especially useful during the outpatient clinic days, using both his Family Practice training and his knowledge of the Tamil language. On Saturday, an all-time record of 260 clinic patients were seen in a single day! Our time here has included a lot of firsts, including me learning my first two Tamil words (“pain” and “where”, if you are interested), doing my first c-section, D&C, and tubal ligation as a non-resident, and figuring out how to manage obstetric complications in a very low resource setting.

A large portion of our time here has been spent continuing to deal with the beaurocracy of practicing medicine in India, which is considerable (as you have all probably heard me lament in the last several months). We actually took a 9 hour bus ride last weekend to Chennai to complete some of said paperwork, only to find out that it had to be done in a completely different city. On the bright side, we did get to do a little exploring!

We will try our best to post as often as we can. Our internet availability is quite limited, so we'll see how this goes. Also, here is a picture of the viper.