August 12th: Saint Johns Medical College

We knew we were going to love Bangalore when they offered to make us eggs at the hotel. We planned to leave bright and early, around 7:30 or so, but our driver never showed up, so we didn’t end up leaving until 9. When we arrived to Saint Johns we were met by the Excel Team, a group doing a program very similar to the Stanford Biodesign program but modified for India.

Patients waiting for treatment in the pediatric ward

They gave us a tour around the hospital and we ended in the NICU. Their NICU infection prevention procedures were more elaborate than those I had seen at Hopkins. We had to scrub, put on clean robes, and we couldn’t touch anything. They had three separate rooms within their NICU. One was for septic newborns, one for newborns requiring acute care, such as ventilators, and one for newborns requiring very little care, such as moderately premature babies. I got to speak with a mother practicing Kangaroo Mother Care with her newborn.

We then went for lunch at the hospital, getting to talk about our programs and projects while we ate samosas and chicken puffs. After lunch we went to visit some prosthetists for Jason’s project, and then while his team worked with the prosthetists a bit more, my team got to go to the post-natal ward and speak with some nurses who worked there.

In the evening, some of us grabbed some rickshaws from our hotel and went to a restaurant called Toit. At Toit we met up with my college friend Aman and were later joined by some of the Excel group and their friends. Toit was the first brewery we had seen in India, and we were very pleased to be ordering pizzas. Bangalore is called the Silicon Valley of India, and its easy to see why. The majority of people speak or understand English and the streets are filled with designer shops instead of the usual small shops. Interestingly, all of the motorcyclists wear helmets which is a huge contrast to what we saw in Hyderabad. We all felt like we had stumbled into some European city, except for the cows determinedly relaxing in the middle of the sidewalks.