Grand Opening! Day 8

Today is the grand opening of Mughul Khan's histopathology lab, located at the Spinghar hotel around the corner from the hospital and our office. Kim and I wore our new outfits from Dr. Mirwais, while Art dressed in the western fashion. He was giving a presentation, because the big draw to the lab is an American doctor from San Diego. We were told that there were about 150-200 people invited, which freaked me and our security out a bit.

We arrived at the hotel about 1.5 hours before the scheduled start time to set up. Afghani's are generally late, so our start time of 10 was more realistically 11, even though Dr. Mirwais assured us everyone was informed that they needed to be on time. Our DAI friends said that this meant people would only be an hour late instead of two.

Watching the guys from the hospital hang banners was entertaining. They stood on a very stable looking ladder...

We started about 11am, with a reading for the Quran. They sang for about 10 minutes. I wish we had had an earpiece with a translator speaking into it. Everything except Art's presentation was in Pashtu, so I didnt understand much of it.

There were many introductions and it was finally Art's turn to speak. He had to stop after eveyry line for translation, and It was interesting to hear how much longer the translations were sometimes. At the beginning of his presentation, Art quoted 8 word from Shakespear and the translator went on for about 2 minutes in Pashtu....but apparently he was explaining something else.

Art's presentation was well received and generated many questions. At one point, there was a heated discussion because a surgeon had done a modified radical mastectomy without a tissue diagnosis. The formalin fixed grossly positive lymph node was sent to us and frozen, confirming a diagnosis of invasive carcinoma. Even though we are in a third world country, the same issues in healthcare present themselves. Except in the US, you could lose your license for that kind of behavior.

After the opening was finished, we had a large lunch for all the participants. Local food, some kind of rice with veggies, chicken, beef, and yogurt with jello topping. Art always has said - don't eat the yogurt. Its not refrigerated. But we all tried a little bit. I liked it - it was coconutty.

We headed back to the hospital for a little while. On Saturday, we finally got a new resistor in the cryostat and froze our first specimen! The axillary lymph node was positive for poorly differentiated carcinoma. It was not the best slide, due to fixation and the fact that our Hematoxylin ended up being brown (ie. oxidized and bad), but it was readable enough. We were able to use all of this information during the grand opening. It was good that we finally got a slide made - it's something really small and easy to do at work in the US, but it was a giant step forward for us in Afghanistan!!

We then went back to the guesthouse to work on reports and presentations. I sat outside at a table with the puppies for a while. Kim donated a pair of socks to them so we could play tug of war. They had a lot of fun with it. I just hope we didn't inspire them to steal laundry off the line.

Dinner was a delicious stew with very large veggies. The cook does a very good job making American dishes, he just doesn't chop veggies very small. For dessert there was a really good fruit salad!