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| View from the breakfast area of Al Yasmeen hotel, our home base. |
I arrived in Nablus about three pm. It was cold: see your breath in the hotel lobby cold! I met Samer, the neurosurgeon from St. Louis. His parents are from Jordan and he was born in Kuwait. We had about a dozen patients waiting for us at the hospital so when Teresa and Ahmal, the two nurses on our team, returned from buying sweaters and gloves we headed out. We saw ten patients in clinic and a couple on the ward. One boy in the ICU had surgery for a tumor at the base of his brain about two weeks ago. Over the last two days he had become unresponsive with downward looking pupils. This is called "sunset eyes", the result of poor function of the third, fourth and sixth cranial nerves, and is a sign of increased intracranial pressure. By this time I was out on my feet, so Samer put an external spinal fluid drain in to relieve some of the pressure. He did this under local anesthesia. Meanwhile, slug that I am, off to bed I went.
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