Take Two...

This morning's workout was a lot of fun. We ran about 35 minutes and did several activities randomly in between running like I had mentioned yesterday. It was difficult but a great workout! We got a few funny looks because we were stopping to do jumping jacks, or lunge, or side step but we got some waves too :)

This morning I tried to work on the Infectious Disease unit but the internet was down most of the morning so I didn't get a lot of work done. I actually napped because I was worn out from going to be late last night and getting up early this morning.

The Hopkins Family as I have mentioned is learning Spanish so today for lunch we had a "Spanish" only lunch. We weren't allowed to speak English. It is good to do this but a lot more difficult also. Most of the Hopkins kids were silent during lunch but we tried to talk with them to get them to speak in Spanish.

During siesta I went out and played with the kids for a little while before I had to leave. I just sat out there with some of the younger girls and held them :)

This afternoon I went back to Batey Isabel and it was very interesting. One woman came in with a large 2nd degree burn on her boob basically (chest wall if you want to say). She spilled coffee from the coffee maker onto her chest yesterday and had a burn that was probably about 1 in X 4 inches. It was large! I have a picture that I'll post tomorrow. She wasn't modest at all about letting me take a picture!

After this, we had to give a girl who was probably about 8-10 years old a shot of penicillin in her behind. From what I understand from her Mom, she's had problems with her throat since she was born and now she has kidney problems. I am assuming she has had strep throat a lot and because of that has developed kidney problems which is common if it isn't treated. So, now she has to receive a shot of PCN every month for 6 months and they want to remove her tonsils. She opened her mouth for me to see and her tonsils were enlarged but didn't look red or anything to me, so perhaps these are just prophylactic shots?

The next interesting patient was an elderly man that smokes and his blood pressure was 210/120. The automatic machine would not record it so we had to take it manually. I had the nurse double check me because it was so high! He was acting fine and didn't seem to be bothered by his extremely high blood pressure but apparently he had run out of his medications. I told him he needed to stop smoking and he was just laughing at me for lecturing him. There aren't a lot of people that I see smoking here, I've probably seen about 10 people smoking in my 6 weeks here but I'm sure there are more smokers than I'm aware of.

We saw an elderly man who was brought over on a moto from his house who was having a very difficult time breathing. He said he has had a lot of chest congestion for the past week or so and is having a hard time walking and breathing. Dr. Garcia listened to his lungs, this was the first time I've seen him use a stethescope since I've been here! He gave him 3 different meds to start but I hope he gets better because he looked like he needed to be in the hospital to help him catch his breath!

The last patient we went to see was an 85 year old woman. We went inside her house because she has a difficult time walking. She was complaining of hip pain, leg pain, and a tremor in her left hand. She had a noticeable tremor in her hand, I assume Parkinson's of some degree. She looked pretty good though for her age. She was talking about how her vision is sometimes good and other times very blurry, and just asking how her BP was, etc. She was very precious and thanked us for coming when we left.

When I returned to the orphanage, they asked me to take out Franchesca's two stitches on her forehead. This story earned the title of the blog tonight. Take two...removing stitches from a screaming child, like before. This time I thought it would be easier because they were on her forehead but it was still hard. She was screaming as Pastor Ramon was holding her head and Carolina was holding her legs. She kept jerking her head side to side and the scissors I had were not at all sharp. After several minutes, I got the two stitches out and then held her in my arms for a little while as she calmed down. Jazmin, an 8 year old girl, brought out a little computer like thing for her to play with but it only lit up and didn't play music like it was supposed to. She played with this for a while and Luis Alberto and Luz Maria came and sat in my lap some as well.

Tonight for dinner Coco cooked Linguini Alfredo and pasto with a pesto sauce. They were both very tasty and a nice little change from the norm.

Wednesday nights the kids have culto so I went out and hung out on the wall waiting for culto to start. Luis Alberto came and laid in my lap and we sat there until culto began. Odalis played his drum set that he made earlier in the week, the one I took some pictures of.

After culto, I promised Mancho that he could play one of the games on my cell phone. They were playing yesterday but the time ran out and he didn't get to play. He played, followed by Ariel, then Carmelo until it was separation time from the kids. They all love playing these games on my phone, not sure I'll ever get away with not letting them play now! AHH!

I'm calling it a night early tonight. I'm exhausted from staying up too late last night! One more day of work and then off to our field trip on Friday with 10 of the orphanage kids!