1-Nueva Luz- zona 42-Patients at Nueva Luz, zona 4 in front of the car
3-The entrance of Nueva Luz-Zona 5. Doc is the one in the jacket with the blue bible
4-Jail cell
5-My new boyfriend (The teenager that asked for my number) haha adorable
I realized this weekend that I'm bound to gain weight here, carbs in their many different forms (beans, rice, tortillas) are the only food group here. So I started every morning taking Lady for a run in the little park in the gated community we live in. It's a gorgeous jungle-like park cluttered with different tropical flowers and trees, it's also the only patch of natural life I've seen in Guat city. I cant really say I'm in love with this city. It does have a ruff around the edges charm but I'm really dying to see a body of water. Marta goes out of town from tue-fri for work so I get to be Lady's mommy for the week. While Marta and I took her to the park the other day she was telling me that Lady was originally the Dr.'s brother's, when he died 2 yrs ago Lady wailed day and night, her nipples grew and filled with milk. When they took her to the Vet they found out she had a hysterical pregnancy from greif- Crazy right?
The mosquitoes here are extraterrestrial. The stealthy bastards don't buzz at all and are half the size of a normal mosquito, so you cant hear or see them coming. Covering up doesn't help, they actually crawl under your sleeves or bite through your clothes. The bites hurt like a sting for a minute before they itch and swell up to the size of a quarter. I'll take the giant caramel colored roaches over those bastards..well I'm not completely sure about that. I had a beastly roach in my room last night actually. I opened my dresser drawer and I saw these 2 inch long feelers sticking out at me, I stayed surprisingly calm and by that I mean my bowels didn't loosen. I ran to get the doc to remove it. He picked it up and dangled it by its feelers and started laughing "dis is what jyou need me for?" he started walking toward me, that's when I lost composure and began squealing, hopping up and down and shaking my hands. He dangled it over his mouth and started lowering it, just to watch me squeal, when Marta heard this she ran in the room just to laugh at the gringa.
Dinner that night was liquefied black beans into a soup. By the time I leave here I'll be able to list off the many variations of black bean dishes like Bubba- Black beans and rice, refried black beans, black bean soup, black bean gumbo....
After we ate it was time to train for my new nursing position at the ibo clinic. I've been delaying this for days, but I guess if I'm going to play a Dr. I'll need something to back it up. First I learned how to measure blood pressure, without the machines we have in the US. It was surprisingly easy, so was testing the oxygen in the blood, not much to it. Then we took it up a level to blood sugar testing. You have to prick the finger and drip the blood on a reactive tab that gets read on a little machine. Doc was being a very good sport, even though I had to draw blood 3 times from his finger until I got it right. Then the needle came out, time to learn how to give an injection. We used vitamins and anesthetic to inject the doc and used the fattiest area so it would hurt the least-the superior external quadrant of the buttocks. The braver you are about it and quicker you stab the less it hurts the patient, I however was painfully slow because my hands were shaking.
Then the one I was dreading for days-taking a blood sample. This was by far the hardest out of the 5. He made me learn to tie the tourniquet correctly with a piece of elastic, if I'm in a situation where I don't have a proper tourniquet I'll need to know how to improvise. That alone took 30 mins, mostly because I dropped the elastic and it snapped him in the eye so we had to take 50 breaks because he couldn't stop laughing at his own smart ass comments that followed. The tricky thing is, you don't have much time once you tie the tourniquet because you can really cause circulation damage if you don't act quickly. After you clean the area you need to locate the vein, which is a nightmare. Once you think you've found the biggest, most lucrative vein you need to insert the needle a 1/2 inch below the spot and keep the syringe as steady as possible because it's terribly painful to have a needle fishing around in your vein. After 3 tries of tapping a vein and no blood coming out, with the doc's help I found it and filled the syringe with his blood. He's going to look like a heroin addict for a couple of days, but no real harm done.
I cannot believe I'm going to be trusted do this to incoming patients at the clinic, and on top of that they'll think I'm a Doctor. God forbid someone chokes, what the hell am I going to say?
The mosquitoes here are extraterrestrial. The stealthy bastards don't buzz at all and are half the size of a normal mosquito, so you cant hear or see them coming. Covering up doesn't help, they actually crawl under your sleeves or bite through your clothes. The bites hurt like a sting for a minute before they itch and swell up to the size of a quarter. I'll take the giant caramel colored roaches over those bastards..well I'm not completely sure about that. I had a beastly roach in my room last night actually. I opened my dresser drawer and I saw these 2 inch long feelers sticking out at me, I stayed surprisingly calm and by that I mean my bowels didn't loosen. I ran to get the doc to remove it. He picked it up and dangled it by its feelers and started laughing "dis is what jyou need me for?" he started walking toward me, that's when I lost composure and began squealing, hopping up and down and shaking my hands. He dangled it over his mouth and started lowering it, just to watch me squeal, when Marta heard this she ran in the room just to laugh at the gringa.
Dinner that night was liquefied black beans into a soup. By the time I leave here I'll be able to list off the many variations of black bean dishes like Bubba- Black beans and rice, refried black beans, black bean soup, black bean gumbo....
After we ate it was time to train for my new nursing position at the ibo clinic. I've been delaying this for days, but I guess if I'm going to play a Dr. I'll need something to back it up. First I learned how to measure blood pressure, without the machines we have in the US. It was surprisingly easy, so was testing the oxygen in the blood, not much to it. Then we took it up a level to blood sugar testing. You have to prick the finger and drip the blood on a reactive tab that gets read on a little machine. Doc was being a very good sport, even though I had to draw blood 3 times from his finger until I got it right. Then the needle came out, time to learn how to give an injection. We used vitamins and anesthetic to inject the doc and used the fattiest area so it would hurt the least-the superior external quadrant of the buttocks. The braver you are about it and quicker you stab the less it hurts the patient, I however was painfully slow because my hands were shaking.
Then the one I was dreading for days-taking a blood sample. This was by far the hardest out of the 5. He made me learn to tie the tourniquet correctly with a piece of elastic, if I'm in a situation where I don't have a proper tourniquet I'll need to know how to improvise. That alone took 30 mins, mostly because I dropped the elastic and it snapped him in the eye so we had to take 50 breaks because he couldn't stop laughing at his own smart ass comments that followed. The tricky thing is, you don't have much time once you tie the tourniquet because you can really cause circulation damage if you don't act quickly. After you clean the area you need to locate the vein, which is a nightmare. Once you think you've found the biggest, most lucrative vein you need to insert the needle a 1/2 inch below the spot and keep the syringe as steady as possible because it's terribly painful to have a needle fishing around in your vein. After 3 tries of tapping a vein and no blood coming out, with the doc's help I found it and filled the syringe with his blood. He's going to look like a heroin addict for a couple of days, but no real harm done.
I cannot believe I'm going to be trusted do this to incoming patients at the clinic, and on top of that they'll think I'm a Doctor. God forbid someone chokes, what the hell am I going to say?
2 comments:
son. this is like the funniest thing ever. i cannot believe that he is having you draw blood from people. i dont even know what to say about that. i wouldnt let you rip a bandaid off my arm.
and i would have flown home after the cockroach in the drawer. you are a better man than I.
I second Libby's bandaid comment. No offense, Tino.
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