Today we didn’t have to travel at all! Our clinic was held right next to our guest house. I started the morning with a peaceful walk to the Kaza Buddhist Monastery, a relatively new monastery, and watched one of the prayers.

We had several interesting echoes today, not all of which were cardiac in nature. Our first was scanning for a pregnancy in a patient who was 18 weeks and had yet to see a physician after missing her period several months ago.

For the first time, I saw a baby in utero and verified her due date and gestational age by measuring her head circumference. Kara, one of our fabulous medical students from the University of Minnesota, explained the findings of the ultrasound to the patient.

The patient was really excited and wanted to take some video of our screen as we had no connectivity or way to email the images to her. Special thanks to our obstetrician, Dr. Tiffany Chen, for teaching our medical students how to do obstetrical ultrasounds.

We were not as busy today, so we spent a lot of time teaching each other. I also had more time to teach echo to our medical students. We spent a lot of time with a patient who had aortic insufficiency and mild mitral stenosis.

We had many requests from our clinic staff (drivers and cooks) to do lab tests using the iStat machine. As a result, we held a combined health clinic and lab draw teaching session.

Two of our students from the UK, Sajeed Ali and Akhi Mulay, took the lead on training many of our US-based medical students on how to safely draw blood and we ran all the tests on the iStat machine. Fortunately, everyone was very healthy, no one hurt themselves in the process, and the machine worked very well.

Finally, we capped off a great day by celebrating the 21st birthday of one of our students, Scarlett, with a delicious cake!

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