Day 6 & 7...and the beginning of 8

Yesterday we spent another day at the Centro Medico Lucas clinic.  We saw pastors and their families, as well as other members of the community.  Mandie and I had the awesome opportunity to work in the lab at the clinic.  It was quite an experience.  We wore no gloves, drew up plasma with eye droppers, saw a cockroach, and disposed of materials in regular trash cans.  It was definitely a learning experience.  We also had the opportunity to change the dressing on the man we had the previous day dressed.

I (Mandie) have had an interesting time adjusting to not being one of the dedicated “doctor” translators this trip. Each day when we get to the clinic, I have not known what I was going to do that day and usually ended up getting pulled in several different directions all the time – triage, the dentist, the pharmacy, a doctor here and there, the “crowd control person”, etc. It’s been fun, but also a little frustrating because I can never be where everyone wants me to be at once. One thing I enjoyed doing was going to each doctor’s station and asking him and the translator if they needed anything. The doctors, as usual, didn’t. But, the translators always wanted chocolate so I ended up making hourly chocolate rounds by the second day. Nursing care at it’s best. AND…the reason I could do this is that Courtney has basically mastered everything you need to say to keep the triage running. Parese aqui. Sientese aqui. Cuantos anos tiene? 

After the clinic, we met Melisa, a 20-something former medical student who was shot in the head three years ago after she fought off a rape. For over two years she lived with bullet fragments in her brain that cause her to have several seizures every day. Her mother came to Suzy for help and Dr. Ken happened to be in the country at that time. During her initial consult with Dr. Ken, Melisa accepted Christ and as soon as he got back to the states, Dr. Ken was able to raise the necessary funds to pay for doctors, an operating room, and the equipment for her surgery. They went through her femoral artery up into her brain to repair a bulging artery behind her eye and then removed her parietal lobe to extract the bullet fragments. Today, she has some residual effects from the trauma and seizures, but is successfully completing radiology technician school and expecting a baby in about 4 months.

At this point in the day, Courtney was coming down with a combination of “Honduran stomach sickness” and a virus that has been travelling around the mission. When we got home, she went straight to bed and spent the night up and down, not getting any sleep.  This morning, several people from our team and the Canadian team were sick and it was comical to see a constant stream of people waiting for the 4 bathrooms. Courtney slept through breakfast and was brave enough to try and come to our last clinic day at Ministerio Jerico. After about 20 minutes, though, the two other nurses on the team (me and Mary) forced her to go sleep on Betsy’s couch. She stayed there until 2:00, at which time when the healthy people left to go shop in Valle de Angeles and the sick people (Dr. Steve, Court, and Dr. Ken) went back to the mission. Shopping was fun, but my favorite cotton candy man was no where to be found. Sad day.

After getting back from Valle de Angeles, we scrambled to clean up as the folks at Mision Caribe were planning to take us to La Cumbre, a gourmet Honduran restaurant overlooking the city. 

When we got back to Mision Caribe, Courtney went straight to bed and everyone got started on pulling out the medicine that we need to leave for Jerico ministries. I stood there trying to help for a while, but after a while abandoned the job to the professionals and came back to the room to write this and clean up. The team was up late getting ready to leave and this morning we had our last devotional. Courtney and I will go with them to the airport and then take the rest of the day to organize, plan the next week, and go through the 1,000+ pictures that we took last week! She woke up feeling 100% better today. The good thing about travelling with a medical team is that when you get sick, you have 16 people clamoring to take care of you. :)

A van packed Honduran style...with room for about 30 more people...

A contented glasses customer...