Uganda Cancer Institute

Today Kelly and I started at the Uganda Cancer Institute which is part of Mulago Hospital up a big hill. There is a mobile mammogram van- which we are hoping to get to spend some time on, a Child Cancer Center, an inpatient center, and an outpatient center. Today we met Dr. Fred our attending who we are going to spend the next few weeks with and he seems to really want to teach so that's gonna be great. There are several medical students from Uganda on the team and 2 from Kenya who are from a dermatological school.  We rounded for several hours today and we saw patients with kaposi's sarcoma (a malignancy found mostly in HIV patients), MASSIVE lymphomas, breast cancer, penile cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer.  Many of these patients presented with very late stage tumors, so many are undergoing palliative care only.  Radiation therapy is so expensive that no one in the area could afford it, therefore it is covered by the government and some foundations, and offered to patients at no charge.

What was interesting was as we walked down the hallways of the hospital, several family members and patients greeted us, went out of their way to wave to us, and several children said hello to us and sort of followed us, and we often heard the term mzunga being said.  We later learned in our cultural lesson that it is very rude in the Uganda cultural to walk past someone without greeting them, and that mzungas is a term for white people, and that it is not derogatory, just their way of describing us.

After this long, sort of draining day at the cancer institute, us three mzungus found an Italian Restaurant and had pizza and calzones, and even found that they had a breast cancer month fundraiser... what a nice surprise :-)