A Day in the Life
Monday morning rolls around and I’ve been assigned to work in the pharmacy. While my main role here is to evaluate the technologies, Baylor is going to put me to use in whatever way they can! Village visits don’t start till Wednesday, so the OB/GYN backpack will stay in a corner for now (except when people pull out extra headlamps, slide sheets, etc. from it). It turns out that two of the exam tables we thought had stirrups for well women exams don’t, so the portable stirrups that come with the OB/GYN backpack have been put to good use as permanent exam table additions. Because there’s no running water in the clinic, I’ve set up the hand washing system between the two OB/GYN rooms. One of our main goals with the system is to monitor water use per hand wash to determine the applicability of the device in areas where water is scarce, so we’ve got a tally system going for each time someone uses the system. I’ll be chatting with people informally to see what they think after they’ve had the chance to use the system and get used to it. But aside from telling them I’ve set up the hand washing system, I haven’t told them much. I didn’t want to explain how the system worked because it’s supposed to be intuitive and I wanted to see how well they used it themselves.
Back to the pharmacy. I’ve been counting pills. So, so many pills. Counting pills and writing labels. I’ve learned to spell acetaminophen and I think that mebendazole (a parasite medication) will forever be a part of my vocabulary. It would have been a great idea to bring down Alex and Tara’s pill counter. As it is, my eyes are strained staring at so many white tablets.
Because I’m not a medical student, I can’t do much in the pharmacy but bag pills. One of my greatest fears was that I would come down here and, because of my lack of training, be useless save for the technologies I brought. In the pharmacy I felt a little bit that way, but I quickly realized that I could make myself useful as an interpreter for those doctors that don’t speak Spanish. Huzzah for being useful!
At 1pm we walk all the way across town, all of five minutes, to the community center that was initially built to act as a meeting place for Shoulder to Shoulder. We’ve got a lovely woman by the name of Nelli who cooks gringo food for us. After every meal we do case conferences, discussing interesting patients. Most of this talk goes over my head, but what I understand is interesting. We return to the clinic to see more patients. We’ve got no end time but instead call it a day when the last patient has gone home.
Speaking of which…patients often get here at 6am, having walked up to two hours from neighboring areas. We open clinic at 8, but people jockey to get a good number in line much earlier. Many of our elderly patients also make this trek. I’m not sure how they do it, especially the return trip in the midday heat. And with unpaved roads (I would twist an ankle).
At 6pm we have dinner, followed by further case conferences. By 8pm, when we finish, it’s dark and the town has shut down save for the gaggle of teenage boys that hang out at the church chatting and listening to music every now and then. We head back to the clinic/our home to watch a movie and call it a night after a full days work. I think I went to be at around 10:15. Earlier than at Rice, that’s for sure.