I thought I was supposed to go from here to Santa Elena to start my placement tomorrow however we are staying the night in the host family’s house in Puerto Lopez and leaving for Santa Elena early in the morning. The food here has been good thus far, no seafood yet fingers crossed although I know I am going to have to choke some down sooner or later, ugh! The houses here are quite different, the roof is like sheet metal kind of and there’s a huge space between the roof and the wall (so reading between the lines there are a lot of bugs in the house!). I have a mosquito net over my bed that I sleep in but there are still these super tiny bugs everywhere I look! I am going to the hospital tomorrow to meet the doctor and staff and I am going to start Tuesday morning I guess. J I am very excited to start my placement!! There are 2 girls from the states that will be living with me in Santa Elena for the week then they are leaving Friday. I am glad because then I can get to know the buses to take or taxis etc. to the hospital. Today I talked a lot with the family, their 5 year old daughter Debora has not stopped following me around and I showed her pictures of my family and friends on facebook and she wants me to braid her hair in a bit haha! I went for a walk on the beach today with the host father, Miguel and there were so many fishermen and fish ewww! Coincidently on the beach I met 2 of the Canadians whom I went hiking with! All I heard was “Brittney”, in English and I was thinking who on earth could be calling me. I was very happy to see them and after supper I am going to meet up with them to hang out! It’s going to be an early night tonight for me, I am definitely overtired and very emotional today for some reason!
The hospital is soo different from Canada. The waiting rooms are outside and the treatment of patients is quite horrific. The first day we sat in on a few consultations then watched some surgeries. We did have to change our scrubs to watch but didn’t have to scrub in or anything. We watched a hernia surgery and a tubal ligation. The two girls from America (Stephanie and Margot) taught me some basic skills (they have completed their first year of podiatric medicine). This included an abdominal exam, breathing, pulse and manual blood pressure, which I still need to perfect. I had learned most of this from before (shadowing with Dr. Ferguson) but not the manual blood pressure. Today we watched surgeries all day. We got to see a ruptured Achilles tendon, which looked so different than I had pictured. We also saw pins put in a broken elbow and a woman who had a prolapsed uterus and who had a simultaneous hysterectomy (that was pretty intense!). I also watched an appendectomy (removal of the appendix). We also saw the very end of a C-section and I was disappointed we didn’t see the whole thing but I have a lot of time left and am determined to see a C-section and a natural birth. The surgeons let the 2 American girls scrub in one at a time for 2 of the surgeries today (I really wanted to but I let them since it’s their last day tomorrow). They got to hold the metal instruments to hold the skin open.
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