Week Three - Final week

So for the weekend we went to the beach at Mamallapurum. I will not go into great detail about this, since this blog is more for my medical experience. But we had a great time and was very relaxing and refreshing. I swam in the Indian Ocean (well the Bay of Bengal), had a massage, and laid by the pool... oh and also shopped. Week 3 I signed up to do a Dermatology rotation for the week. I actually only ended up not doing so much Derm, but did have a educational week and saw a lot of interesting things. After the trip back from the beach, I was not feeling so hot and my stomach was having issues. This was first time I felt sick the whole trip. I ended up taking a course of Cipro after my stomach continued to have a mind if its own for 3 days. The Cipro and Loperamide helped alot and by Thursday, I was feeling great. So Monday I went to Dermatology Clinic. I loved it! I saw a lot of interesting skin disorders and the Departmental Head doctor would have all the students (the students that go the school at CMC and me) come in to see some rare cases. She would explain the disease and pull out books for us to look at. We saw epidermolysis bullosa, which is a disorder in the skin in which the skin is missing an anchoring protein to hold the skin together. Due to this, whenever the child undergoes mild trauma (just bumping his head and crawling) can lead to bulla to form on the skin. The first child we saw had healing bullae all over his body, but was of good weight. His nails were thickened and narrow. This type of EB was Dowling-Meara ( I had never heard of this before). This is a not so severe type. Another child I saw with the resident I was with had EB as well, but had a congenital dystrophic form - a severe form. This child was very thin, one eye was blue and dysconjugate (not moving together with the other eye) and had severe bulla and scarring over his body. The back of his neck was covered by a scab from the trauma of his shirt collar on his shirt. He also had no fingernails or toenails, part of this disease. He also had contractures of his fingers due to repeated scarring. A very sad site. It was amazing how he was still able to manage buttons and take care of himself with these deformities. Some of the other diagnosis I saw: - tinea capitis ( ringworm on the head) with alopecia (loss of hair) - tinea corporis (ringworm on the torso) - vitiligo - bad staph aureaus skin infection - malasma - leprosy - erythematous plaques covering a man's body who was being worked up for possible Sezary syndrome or other underlying malignancy ...among others. I will write about the rest of the week at a later time. We leave for Chennai today (Friday). I need to go finish packing and try to fit all the things I bought here into my bag. = 0