On the first solidly sunny day in a week and a half, I am genuinely coming down with a cold. Last week, I could practically feel the little kid germs crawling on my skin. Everyone came in sneezing and coughing. “If nothing else does, this will get me sick,” I kept thinking to myself. Although I tried to deny I was coming down with something over the weekend, this morning I woke up feeling gross. Though I expected today’s efforts to climb over the Insurmountable Language Barrier to be more easily rebuffed than usual today, I found that having a cold makes it a lot easier to blur the distinction between my Spanish “b”s and “v”s, which I can pretty much never do while healthy.
Along with the cold germs that seem to have taken up residence in my sinuses, making my head feel like it’s being squeezed in a vice, several new tropical friends have suddenly moved into the bathroom. We’ve now got a large (“It’s not that big,” says Audra) mini-tarantula-esque spider and some kind of small lizard that settled in the shower.
We also have a new intern. And a new attending.
With Alicia here we’ve got a triad of names bookended by “a” sounds and the beginning of some kind of joke: Audra, Alicia and Ilena walk into a bar... Alicia brought two crucial things (in addition to her lovely self): DVDs (particularly season 1 of “Desperate Housewives”) and the news that iTunes is selling current episodes of “LOST” (an incurable addiction of mine).
Stephanie discovered another hospital absurdity to add to the list: an X-ray of a pregnant woman, hanging on the wall in the labor and delivery room. As there are no ultrasound machines here, to conclusively determine the position of an unborn baby x-rays are the only resource available.
Clinic was eerily quiet the past week. Only a handful of children showed up each day, along with a tall Cuban doctor who comes in to use our internet and asks me questions (en espanol) about navigating yahoo mail. Hep A kid came back and looks much improved; where before there was a completely lifeless-looking child there is now a kid that looks healthy. I’m glad his illness has turned around. Sadly, we also made him and his mom come back, twice, as they were unable to get the lab test done yesterday and we were unable to wait for the results expected at noon this afternoon (considering we closed up shop at 10:30).
On Alicia’s first day in the clinic, everything went smoothly, despite one little girl throwing a tantrum and nearly hitting Alicia in the face. Hep A kid was finally seen and has continued to improve.
Two days later we were greeted in the morning by a hallway full of people and 30 charts. Alicia and I divided our triage duties in half, sharing access to the scale and the growth charts and trying to dodge the half-dozen random people who kept appearing and complicating an already overwhelming process. First the Cuban doctor whose been using our internet, then a nurse with two women and a newborn in tow (who claimed there were here because the baby had a fever – but it was normal when we took the temperature) who disappeared shortly afterwards, then the pharmacist, looking for a file Nora had left on the computer (which was supposedly in Spanish although we couldn’t find it) who returned later (at possibly the most inconvenient moment of all, when Alicia and I had five kids between us that we were trying to juggle) with Nora in tow, Dr. Green for a short time and finally an absolute parade of crazy mothers. One woman kept insisting that she was third in line, though I had found her chart at the bottom of the pile. Another mother showed up with her kids in tow but with no charts, asking for a doctor to read her lab results; Dr. Charles read her the riot act but saw the kids anyway and ended up sending the family to Valerie’s to get the youngest, suffering from a completely hacking cough, a third HIV test. A family of three came in and the middle child, a girl, began almost silently throwing up a stream of bright orange vomit into our wastebasket. I felt both sorry for the girl and grateful for her neatness and discretion.
After our take-no-prisoners triage efforts, Alicia and I finished early and read up on parasites, infectious diseases, pediatric dermatology and Global Healing’s advice and protocols while kids were crying and vomiting all around us. Charles had given Alicia one of the greenish yellow “oranges” they sell outside the hospital; one little boy started chattering away at us, asked for our orange and proceeded to start hiding it in his baseball cap while coming in and out of our area. He was obviously bright and completely adorable. Despite some of the craziness that occurs daily, working here has its rewards.
