Week 13: Medicina!

I did my first mobile clinic last week, and it was /great/. Essentially, mobile clinic = packing our school's doctors, dentist, nurse, students, and medical supplies into a minivan and driving between 30 and 90 minutes to a rural village and seeing a bunch of patients. Interestingly, last week we went to the same village - the same community leader's house, in fact - that hosted the elote festival from over a month ago.

The clinic was bare bones but great. We had two rooms, both with dirt floors, one for the dentist and one for the doctors. Giving the dentist his own room made sense, since all he was doing was pulling teeth that morning. The docs' room had a plastic roof, a plastic table and two stools on one end, and an old barber's chair at the other. Deb, a pediatrician, and I sat at the table and saw niños, while Dr. Christian, a Guatemalteco, saw the adultos. We saw somewhere around 15 kids in the half day, and almost all of them had 1. stomach pain and 2. a headache (from dehydration). So almost all of the kids 1. got albendazole, an antihelmintic (read: dewormer) and 2. education on the importance of drinking at least /1/ glass of liquid per day. All the kiddos also got 3. children's vitamins, since almost all of them are small for their age, probably due to malnutrition. And, unfortunately, after they visited the doctors, most of them visited the dentist too to lose a couple of teeth.



The Pop Wuj medical program continues to be incredibly crazy - sometimes it feels like being on IM again - but I'm learning, darn it: I'm starting to remember the right questions and commands for interviewing and examining patients, and I'm understanding more of what the patients are saying, which is only of slight importance, no? I'm still taking classes in the afternoon after clinic. Right now I'm working on learning the tenses of subjunctive (very, very roughly equivalent to "If I were you"). Oy. I may get my first concussion from subjunctive, and it will be because I had been banging my head on my desk.

I'm still enjoying Guatemala. I baked brownies for the Thursday dinner. They were tasty, largely because of the US peanut butter and Ghirardelli chocolate chips that Mr. Matt Percy brought down for me. Surprisingly, Guatemalan PB is no good; it is expensive and/or loaded with palm oil. Not good for eating, and even less so for baking.

I haven't gotten new bed bug bites in a while, but I remain suspicious. The problem with this attitude is the hyper-vigilance; you discover a lot of false positives. For example, just a few mornings ago I nearly flipped a lid when I discovered a line of three red dots on my butt. Luckily, on closer inspection they turned out to be just zits. Attractive, right? (sorry Caleb) But way better than bed bug bites. But if it's not pimples, there's the dry skin, the mosquito bites, the razor burn, the random flea attacks, etc. Needless to say, I'm itchy almost all of the time, and "not being itchy" is one of the things I'm definitely looking forward to when I get back to the States.

This week has been crazy; folks from the Timmy Foundation are here on a "Timmy brigade", so we've been doing mobile clinic almost every day. It has been exhausting, so next week I'm taking the week off to go to Todos Santos Cuchumatán for the Day of the Dead and All Saint's Day celebrations, and afterward heading over to Lago de Atitlan for some by-the-waterside studying. And in two nights a group of us are going to attempt a night summit of Santa Maria, a beautiful cone volcano near Xela (12,375 feet). I'll be sure to take pictures and tell the stories :)