It seems like ages since my last post. I don´t even know where I left off! Last Tuesday carnivale finished off. There was more gringo paint being thrown. We were drenched and covered in thick paint. Most of the paint has come off by now, but there still a bit left on my skin! We watched a movie, 27 dresses. It was in English, but subtitles in spanish, which was really interesting. I think I picked up a few new vocab words during the show!
Wednesday we headed out to the clinic. There was 12 of us headed to a house made for 6. Needless to say, space was tight! The road finally had dried out and we could make the extra half hour drive down a very bumpy dirt road. The clinic is pretty remote. I really felt cut off from the world out there, I was probably the most cut off that I´ll ever be. There was tons of bugs! But the stars were beautiful. The land around the house and clinic have a bunch of horses. They would come right up to the clinic door.
The first day, everyone split up. I headed out to one of the remote villages with a couple other doctors. The village was cute, but poor. We saw patients on someone´s front porch. Our waiting room was their front lawn. In that village, it was mostly young women and children. I saw some interesting stuff, though. Diagnosed a kid with pericarditis without an EKG. Since there are so many internist down here, I decided to just bang right through all of the kids. It was fun. But trying to decide who gets the amoxicillin and liquid tylenol when we only have 2 bottles was not fun! Afterwards we all gathered at the house for chicken curry and divided up the rooms/beds. I luckily ended up in a bedroom with 2 beds and a total of 3 girls. We pushed the beds together and slept pretty comfortably 3 across. In the other room, there was 2 bunk beds and 4 people, but apparantly, one person snores like no other so I was glad not to be in that room. Our bosses slept on the couch and on a spare mattress in the kitchen. 2 boys had to sleep in the clinic, which I imagine was pretty buggy!
The next morning we split up again. We headed out to another village that was pretty remote, but large. We saw a lot of people there at a ¨"hostel", if you could even call it that. Again, I tried to stick to the kiddies! Lots of rashes around here. I bunch I didn´t even know what I was looking at. There was one old guy with a raging STD. He was 68. Good for him.
Anyhow, the third day we all stayed at the clinic all day. The clinic is really nice. It´s big and spacious and like a full functioning clinic. There´s a room for eye exams, dental, and gyne. I saw lots of patients, but the one that sticks out was an 8 year old girl with some bony abnormalities from birth and severe scoliosis. At home she would have surgery on her back. We´re going to try and convince someone to come and do surgery on this girl. That night, half of the people left because they were flying home. I finally felt like we could breathe again. We found out that a cat had given birth under one of the bunk beds, and there was much excitement in pulling her out and looking at the kittens.
Today we saw a few patients in clinic and headed home. Since the main driver had left with the others the day before, I had to drive us home because I was the only one who knew how to drive stick shift. Unfortunately it had been raining all day. The road was really muddy and slippery, but I´m proud to say that we didn´t get stuck once. I drove the whole 2 hours back to Santa Cruz, even though all of the drivers are crazy. On the way back we saw a lady get on the back of a motorcycle in the rain carrying a cake, right out in the open, not even in a box. Everyone here is crazy. Right now I´m getting ready to head off to La Paz. I hope that I don´t get altitude sickness, the capitol is 14,000 feet up there.
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