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Be back soon!

After doing a week of night shifts, I went to Newark, NJ to take a 3 day course to get me sufficiently full of details of physics and anatomy to take the written test for ultrasound certification (RDMS). It was put on by ESP Ultrasound and is intended primarily for certification of technicians, so there were many mostly young women there who had very different backgrounds than I did. An experienced ultrasound tech knows tons of intimate details of anatomy after visualizing its inner mysteries daily. I have much to learn. As for how those intricate parts behave in health and disease, I definitely know more. The physics of ultrasound is complex and fascinating, but that was not what was covered in the course. It unabashedly provided us with the information we would need to pass the test. I am grateful, if unenlightened. I then hung out with friends in rural New Jersey for a week forgetting anything medical, singing and laughing and eating good food.

Today I head to Tanzania with my Chinese ultrasound machine and several University of California medical students to do a study on ultrasound and Malaria diagnosis and teach medical professionals to start doing bedside ultrasound. This is what I expect we are doing, but from my experience in Haiti, we will probably do something else which is, as yet, a mystery. I will probably not write anything while I'm there, but then it may turn out that it is perfectly possible to post from some random computer in an Internet cafe. I'm sure, at the very least, I will post something by early July, most likely something exotic and fascinating. I will leave my cheap but adequate Chinese ultrasound machine behind and will have a good idea about how it works and some photos to post. See you in July!

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