Going Up In Flames

~ Wednesday 23rd July

My parents were touching down mid-afternoon so I went to the hospital this morning. I figured I wouldn't be able to sit still at home anyway (the jitters were too much to handle) so what better way to keep them in check than to sit in surgery for a few hours.

Oral surgery as opposed to operating theatre is where they carry out minor surgeries under local anaesthetic and they can range from removing wisdom teeth as well as impacted teeth and apicectomies (removing the tip of a tooth root but it's usually associated with root canal treatment so in Africa it's not really common to see) to trauma cases where a fractured or broken jaw has to be fixed.

The latter can take hours so again, I only saw one case today; I watched the intermaxillary fixation (IMF) of a 20-something year old who'd been in a motorcycle accident and he'd fractured his jaw so it needed stabilising. They placed arch bars on his upper and lower teeth and then tied wires between them to secure them, locking the upper and lower jaws together. It acts to literally force the two jaws together and keep them in place so the bones reset in their correct positions.

I've put in a couple of pictures to show exactly what it is because it's one of those things that has to be seen rather than explained.

The poor guy can't eat for 8 weeks so he's been put on a liquid diet but yeah, it looked pretty painful. It was interesting to watch, tedious as hell and so damn fiddly, but interesting.

Then I got picked up and headed straight to the airport. Felt like the longest trip of my life! But seeing my family again after the first time I've ever been away from them has to be one of the sweetest moments to go down in my life. It doesn't compare.

And then on our way back home, one of our two cars, the one in which my dad, brother, cousin and uncle were in, (along with majority of their luggage), started smoking up. It'd had a dodgy engine from before and it had been shuddering when it entered the airport car park but firstly, there was nothing we could do at the time (we couldn't exactly call the RAC), and secondly, we thought it'd get us home. Boy, how wrong we were. I was in the car following and being all women, we were sort of freaking out. And (beats me why), my uncle wasn't stopping the car, he was happily dragging out the engine until it completely blew and flames started to flicker out from under. It took the Malawian public flagging them down and shouting "FIRE! FIRE!" for them to pull over and get out. I thought they were goners. If they hadn't stopped, they would have been.

Luckily it was a main road so the owners of the shops were trying to help. Well, they were throwing mud and sand on the flames in an attempt to put it out - every little helps, right? Then, in a scene replicating that of a Hollywood blockbuster, a fire engine pulled up, sirens full blast, and as they tried to use the fire extinguisher...they realised it had no water.

Ah, life in the third world hey?

(Here's the Hollywood shot of the kid walking his hero walk away from the dramatic unfoldings)

It was nice to have a bit of excitement injected into my holidays though. Even if it did border a near-death experience.

And since we've reached home I haven't shut up! My poor mum is probably suffering from an earache. She's rooming with me and I'm like, cramming in a month's worth of news in the space of a night. Bless her.

I feel like the happiest girl in the world though :)