February 21, 2011

February 21, 2011 – Monday

--I was up early, very excited - I walked across the street to his office, CBCHB- Community Counseling Center – coincidentally I work for Community Counseling Centers at home in Arizona!  We’re seeing patients again today.  The CBCHB doctors do their best, but the formulary is limited, and none of them are psychiatrists or know much of anything about psychotropics.  When they’ve tried and failed, they refer psychiatric patients to Godlove.  We saw 3 patients, one of whom has been taking antipsychotics which are partially controlling her tormenting voices but she’s developed severe muscle pain and stiffness – the prescribing doctor sent her to Godlove to see what he can do.  I knew immediately that she was having side effects to her antipsychotics and sent the lady’s husband to a pharmacy for benztropine which we use regularly in the US.  He returned after trying 7 pharmacies, none of which had ever heard of benztropine – hmmm? The only option was to recommend Benedryl which will work, but taking enough of it will make her very sleepy day and night.

--Godlove took me to lunch at Friendship, then I had the afternoon off to stroll around the neighborhood with Joe.

--We had another new adventure.  Sam Waller is a Canadian accountant who is here to help some community counsels develop record-keeping systems.  Several times we’ve enjoyed visiting over breakfast, and today we decided to take a taxi to town to a restaurant that he recommended, Dreamland.  Taxis here are very inexpensive, about 500 cfa ($1.00) per person – it seems the drivers must make their money by the volume of fares.  It is common for a taxi to carry 7-8 people with a lot of personal belongings – people go a few blocks and get out and others climb in.  So, we got in and Sam told the driver we’re going to Dreamland.  It wasn’t long till our taxi had more people going the same general direction that we were.  We arrived at an unfamiliar street and the taxi stopped midblock, “this is it” said Sam.  We climbed a steep 2-story flight of stairs with no landing, and entered a lovely restaurant with white table cloths and formally attired wait staff.  At our request, we were seated on the balcony where we watched the street below.  The food was good – spicy chicken, rice, fried plantains, red sauce, hot sauce, pepper soup – yum!  Then back to the Rest House in another taxi, repeating the trip in reverse.