Max and I have reached our halfway point of working by ourselves in each clinic, so we switched places on Thursday. Peggy’s clinic is closed on Wednesdays, so I got to go to the hospital to hear Dr. Dominguez’s talk (part of the weekly lectures Global Healing tries to put on) on developmental displasia of the hip. He was a great speaker and the talk was interesting to hear, so that was fun.
Dr. Welcome had to go to Tegucigalpa to interview for jobs for the coming year, so there is now a social service doctor (Dr. Andres Ordóñez) in his place until he comes back either late next week or the following week. He’s a nice guy and knows the hospital very well, obviously, so I think it will be fine, although the new pediatrician came in today and hopefully he’ll give her a good orientation tomorrow. He does seem to take his time in the morning, though, and especially now that I know how it feels to arrive early in the morning at a clinic and not be seen until the afternoon, I do wish that patients could be seen starting a little earlier. We’ll see what the schedule this week is like.
There weren’t really any unusual cases this week in clinic, but I’m enjoying being in the Global Healing clinic so far, although it can be frustrating working in the public health system. For example, for some reason the lab decided to stop doing stool exams and urine tests this week, and a patient referred there from our clinic came back without anything to help us diagnose his illness, which was frustrating.
Although the tutoring program started on Tuesday, I was in La Ceiba so didn’t start until Thursday. I think it will go really well – we had five students on Thursday with five tutors, so it worked out perfectly. We’re still expecting a few more to join the program, but we might also be able to get a few more tutors, including the new Global Healing resident. The girl I worked with is an honor student, and was very bright and fun to work with. She seemed genuinely interested in learning the material, which makes the tutoring so much more worthwhile.
We had an eventful night on Thursday (see Max’s journal for even more eventfull-ness), as someone who works with Peggy got in a car accident with his wife. There was a large truck stopped in the middle of the road without any lights on it, and by the time he saw it, it was too late to swerve. So he hit it front on, and, luckily, both he and his wife are fine. They called Peggy, though, to come help the wife, who had slammed her head into the dashboard and needed some medical attention. We went to the crash site, where there were no police, ambulances, or anything, something you’d never see in the states. Peggy said that it’s practically useless to call an ambulance, as they can take hours to get there and were even shopping at Eldon’s once when she tried to call them. So, we took the wife up to the clinic and Dr. Patrick examined her. She had no bleeding, but had had a concussion. Dr. Patrick highly doubts that she has any kind of internal bleeding, but it’s impossible to tell on the island without any kind of brain imaging. So, the whole night was a powerful reminder of how limited medicine is on the island and how people can really suffer from it.
Outside of clinic, I’ve gotten to go back and visit Neri, Jessica (the patient I took to the mainland), and the family, and really love being able to spend time with them. I just really hope they don’t get too overwhelmed with all the different medications Jessica has to use, since it is a lot to keep track of (some every six hours, some every 4, etc.). Max and I also finally went on our first SCUBA dive today, which was lots of fun!
