Boats, floats and er....kidneys

salut mes amis.

It's been a busy week and a busy weekend. I returned back to the renal ward this week to try and be useful to the externes in the week before their exams, i really don't like that ward, it just constantly feels like a waste of my time. But on thursday I got to go and see a pre-transplant consultation and then friday see the nephrectomy and transplant. The nephrectomy was the craziest operation I've ever seen, they like made an incision, put in this weird port thing and then the surgeon put his arm in and was wriggling it around inside this womens abdomen, i half thought he was going to pull the kidney out there and then and go "ta daa". He did not. But he did still do the whole operation with his hand inside this womens abdomen, it was kinda cool. Then he did his victory route taking the removed and cleaned up kidney round to the other operating room where they were ready waiting for the kidney to go in.

Am spending next week mostly on dialysis i think, and I might try to go to a few more outpatients clinics. Am quite looking forwards to renal being over and starting obs and gynae though really.

Friday was the official one month countdown to our last day of placement here in Nantes, it's gone really quickly and 1 month seems like a nice manageable amount of time left. We celebrated on friday night with burgers (real fake cheese and everything) and a bottle of fizz mmmmmm.

Saturday me, marie, brittany and karen (who are american) and canadian chris who we went to the beach with last week did one of the things i've been wanting to do ever since we got here - we hired a boat and went boating up the Erdre, I call it 5 english speakers go boating up a french river.

That said, there was no bags of lettuce, we didn't happen across any smugglers or really have any adventures at all. There was ginger beer though and an amazing picnic including lovely fresh bread and sun-melted camembert and strawberries. It was a gorgeous day and really lovely getting out of town on the river and chateau-spotting as we got out into the countryside. Then we came back and in the evening went down to the night carnaval. we got a look at the line up of floats as we were walking down and .... they were EXACTLY the same as last week, with the exception of the odd dancing group added, and they'd taken the bikini top off the float with the health minister (tee hee). It was still raelly good fun though and we got into a massive confetti fight with this group of little boys - there is SO much confetti on my floor this morning. We finished the night with some churos or chi chi - these like fried dough sticks, greasy but good - i've never had them before.

So, one more week of renal for me, and neuro for me and then next weekend marie's parents are coming which I'm really looking forwards to. I'll add some photos shortly and I promise I'll try and find myself another trashy romance novel tihs week, i've been having a bit of a break reading proper books.

bisous

alex