Uganda Spine Surgery Mission - Team 3 Day 1

Team three arrives eagerly at Bush International Airport with a surplus of bags. Once all checked in, the team boarded the first leg of the 24 hour trip. Team three has the advantage of all working together at Houston Methodist Hospital. The team consists of Dr. Paul Holman (neurosurgeon), Dr. Zane Boghani (neuro resident), Rebecca Arroyo (RN), Anthony Crockell (Neuro monitoring specialist), Jon (Medtronic rep) and Nadia Mirza (surgical technologist). Dr. Holman and Nadia were the only veterans on the team.

These are just a couple of the giant bags filled with supplies. 

After the first flight, we stopped at Huxley's to refuel the team. There were no volunteers to be the customary scribe for the blog so Anthony downloaded an app called "tap 
roulette". We agreed that we would have two people to split up the scribe role. All the team members placed one finger on the phone, and we let the phone pick the scribe randomly. After two separate rounds, Nadia and Zain were the lucky chosen ones! 
After a long 19 hours of traveling, we finally arrived at Entebbe airport. Last years 5 hour bus ride to the hotel consisted of an unsealed bus with 50 degree wind gusts and no shocks! Every town has a series of speed bumps, and without shocks you are catapulted with every bump. This year we were super excited to see brand a new bus. 

After arriving at the Lakeview Resort, we were able to check in and we were finally able to take a nap on an actual bed before organizing ourselves for the week to come. To Dr. Holman and Nadia's surprise the rooms were renovated! No mosquito nets are required and everything is 10x better. In the new rooms there are air conditioning units (that may or may not work), and the rooms are bigger. In addition, there are mini fridges (that may or may not work),and robes with slippers. The little things such as A.C. is well appreciated. Traveling for a long period of time can be stressful, but for this group of individuals, it turned out to be pretty easy even though you still need to learn yoga before you step onto the 5 hour bus ride from Entebbe to Mbarara.

Quote of the day: actually conversation of the day really,
Zane said, "So whose doing anesthesia?"
Dr. Holman said, "Anesthesia machine is self aware!"
Anthony said, "SkyNet is controlling it!"