Another BUSY week at clinic #12!
Ever since Dr. Sabio and Esteban arrived we have been seeing more than our usual amount of patients, very steadily. No more early days where we have very few patients and get out before noon! I think that this is partly to do with the fact that our current doctors ask just about everyone that comes through here to come back to the clinic. They are very thorough. It's kind of nice to see the familiar faces of returning patients everyday.
Monday was a holiday, which I did not know about until the Sunday before so I was nicely surprised. It was apparently Day of the Americas, something I had never heard of before. When I tried asking several people about it they all told me they had no idea what was supposed to happen on this holiday. Perhaps it's just an excuse to take off school and work. Either way, I enjoyed it very much and spent the day catching up on sleep and school work.
Tuesday and Wednesday were long days, with lots of patients and many complicated, time consuming cases. This included a kid with a possible case of Tuberculosis that needed a chest x-ray and a child with very severe sickle cell anemia. There was also a sweet little boy that had such a bad case of lymphadenitis that he had to be admitted to the hospital. Apparently he had been on antibiotics for three days and the thing was growing, not shrinking. One really interesting thing about that boy was that eleven years old he was hardly 29 pounds and not quite up to my waist in height!
Elsa taught lectures on Tuesday and Thursday to a group of nurses and even a doctor. The lectures presented all sorts of general information on how to educate patients with diabetes. About eighteen people in total showed up and as far as I can tell, they were a success.
Thursday was a national strike day which, of course, included the hospital workers. Apparently farmers, teachers, and all sorts of other employees nationwide were striking for more funding and benefits from the government. During clinic I could hear people shouting into megaphones outside my window, although I could never really decipher exactly what they were saying. The strike of course meant that the clinic was really quiet and we saw only patients. The bad thing about the strike is that it makes it impossible to get patients charts and as a result, the examining sheets from that day will never make it into their records.
Everything returned to it's normal busyness on Friday. We saw around 20 patients, all with fairly common and treatable illnesses. We had quite a few ten day check-ups and almost all the babies seemed in good health. Unfortunately a one month old girl also came in with a heart murmur that we had to refer to Tegucigalpa. However I also saw probably the cutest baby I have ever seen at clinic today and that cheered me up quite a bit.
This weekend I plan to do a lot of nothing and hang out at the beach. I have reached the last month of my stay and it's strange to think that I only have four more weekends here!
