1. Priced and Pursued | 2. Trapped within the System | 3. The Shape of Equality Across Cultural Divides [Trigger warning: I will be retelling the case of a 15-year-old rape patient we had at our hospital.] It kills me to tell these stories. It kills me to not tell these stories. If I lose either way, I might as well write them down, lest they be lost to my memory, lost to time, and lost to history. I have been avoiding writing in my blog about feminism for weeks. Who should l

More posts to follow, but for now, a brief update from Switzerland and link to the Albertine Hospital website A beautiful view on my drive from Kisiita to Kampala. I was trying to zoom into a class during this drive. As you may have guessed, it did not go very well. This is a phrase that we’ve started saying at the hospital a lot. I first learned how to ask patients “Obuzibu nki?” Which means “What is the problem?” But now, whenever the power goes out for the 10th time, or we

If you had to decide to pay for a patient's medications, patient's testing, or a patient's operation, which one would you pick? Or would you instead pay for equipment at the hospital that benefits ALL patients indirectly, but none individually? What do you do when you cannot pay for everything, and so every decision to fund one thing is a decision not to fund another? The last few days have made it clear that I am flying blind. I do not know if I am making the best decisions,

A note for all of the patients that go home untreated There is a price attached to almost every decision in medicine here, and it is rarely abstract. It is counted in cash, in livestock, in phone calls to relatives, and sometimes in the quiet act of walking away. Lately, money has felt like the invisible vital sign in every room—always present, always shaping outcomes. Over the past weeks, we have seen patient after patient whose care hinged not on diagnosis or skill, but on

Case Notes #1 : 31F HIV+ patient and her newborn baby Life is moving sweetly—but sometimes it moves fast enough to force hard decisions. We have been treating a 31-year-old woman who gave birth by caesarean section at 3:00am on January 26th. When we tested her blood later that morning, we discovered that she is HIV positive. When we shared this result with her, she told us she already knew. But she also told us something else—that her husband doesn’t know, that no one in her