Hola!
Well it's my 4th day here and I'm still really liking it! Yesterday morning I, along with 8 other volunteers, went on rounds with the doctors. It was interesting but I couldn't understand a lot of what they were saying. On rounds, all the doctors go to each patient in the hospital (there aren't that many) and one of them informs the entire group of how they are doing. After rounds my friend Katie and I got to shadow the pediatrician which was really interesting. I was amazed by how much I understood of what she was saying to the parents! Most of the kids she saw had a fever, or bad cough, although three siblings had crupe (sorry that's not spelled right :) ). The doctor let us listen to one of the boy's with crupe lungs and they did NOT sound good. It was a very similar experience to the one I had when a shadowed a nurse practitioner in the U.S.
Later that afternoon I went to "English Camp", which is a camp for an orphanage of girls that a missionary puts on for one week every summer to try and help the girls learn English. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot of spanish too!! We had one-on-one conversations with the girls in English and played games and did arts and crafts with them. For one of the games we did relays in which each person had to run backwards... this proved to be very difficult for me and I wiped out HARD two times... I blame the altitude :).
Today I went to English camp in the morning, and had a really good time. It is really enjoyable to be with the girls and fun to try to communicate with them with my limited spanish and their limited English. In the afternoon I got to watch a surgery in which a women was getting both her gall bladder and appendix removed. This is when I discovered surgery may not be the best place for me... or at least the prep that is involved.
We came into the room as one of the surgeons was injecting some type of numbing medicine into the back/spine region of the patient. Then they lay her down on the table and duct taped her legs to the table... this is when I started to get a little shaky. Next, they rubbed a lot of orange-colored stuff on her stomach, and she started to shake because it was so cold. I realized at this point that she wasn't going to be put under, and that she would be awake during the entire procedure!! They started to cut into her belly button Before I knew it, the room was going blurry, I felt like I was about to fall over, and before I knew it one of my fellow volunteers guided me out of the room to a couch. I lay there for about 15 minutes and decided to try again. This time, I had no problems :)
The surgery itself was really cool to watch! They did it laparoscopically and we could see everything they were doing on the TV screen. The procedure only took about two hours, and I only felt like passing out for half of it! :)
The people I'm getting to know are amazing, and I'm really enjoying myself! Tonight I'm on dinner duty and it's mexican themed so we just finished making pico de gallo!
Well, I have to run and finish, hope all is well with everyone who is reading this!
Chao!!
Emily
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