Today was a tough day at the cancer institute (as I'm sure all days are!) So if you only want the light stuff, please skip ahead now... We saw a woman with breast cancer where you actually saw her cancer, not her mass through the skin, but the tumor had eaten away all the tissue around it and you saw her tumor directly. She was only in her forties and her lungs were speckled with mets. To think how someone could present this late in the disease course just baffles me. We then went over to the child cancer center where we met a 3 year old boy with Burkitt's Lymphoma, a form that only exists here in East Africa where the tumor appears in the mouth or jaw, and doubles in size every eight to sixteen hours!! If a patient presents after four weeks, there is no hope for survival as it will eventually spread to the abdomen and brain. There is no understanding as to why this disease only affects patients here, and with such little money in healthcare, I don't know if research is a top priority. Both of these patients had such poor prognoses, and I felt very powerless when spending time with them today.
On a brighter note, we went to a very fun traditional Uganda dance show. Performers did dances from all different parts of the country, and musicians played traditional instruments, and singers chanted along. It was a lot of fun!
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