It's a very long story, but there's a chicken in it...

This will probably be one of our longest blog entries ever - at least we hope so. The last three days have possibly been some of the longest in our lives. It's Sunday evening here and Friday seems like it was two weeks ago. But we might as well start there...

Friday was clinic with at Roy Espinosa's church in Chinique. Roy is a good friend of ours and the organization. He was born and raised in Texas and speaks both English and Spanish fluently, so it's nice to have someone who can actually help us with our Spanish from time to time. (We're getting much better, but we're never going to sound like natives!). Plus, Roy is a neat guy and really cares about his people.

Friday night, a mother and her baby showed up on our doorstep from several hours away because they heard that there was a team here who could fix cleft palates. Sadly, no, but we got their information because we're looking for help with another baby, too. They don't have a phone, but their neighbor does, so when we find help, we'll get in touch with them.

Saturday morning, still before sunrise, we started our weekly trip to Canilla. Little did we know what was in store for us! The drive was horrible. It took us nearly three hours to travel the twenty-something miles (normally a two hour drive). The roads were horrendous for about the first half of the drive, then improved dramatically at the point we saw a grader on the side of the road. Apparently, it had run a portion of the road and hopefully will continue later this week.

Clinic on Saturday was an absolute zoo. It seemed like half the town had shown up. (The first picture is of Heidi and Matt working with a patient during clinic. The patient had explained that she wasn't making any milk. We asked her to demonstrate and she squirted milk all over the place, including on Matt. It looks like things are working just fine, thank you.)

Another patient, a 75 year old woman from a nearby village, came in with a "surgical belly", meaning that it was obvious from a minute or two after she came in the door that she needed surgery. An ultrasound showed what we believed to be a gall-bladder about the size of a grapefruit. We told her and her daughters that she needed surgery and that we would try to find an ambulance for them to get her to Quiche. Fine. So we began the process of locating an ambulance (you don't just call 911 here). As Matt and Joseph Ficker were leaving on a four-wheeler, the family changed their minds. They wanted to talk about it amongst themselves. What there was to talk about was beyond us, but it's their perogative. Twenty minutes later, they wanted an ambulance again.

Matt and Joseph went into town and found a member of the city council. He said the ambulance was there but might not be working. A few minutes later, it was confirmed that the ambulance was working, but they didn't know where any of the bomberos (EMTs) were. A few minutes later, two of them were located. Then the mayor had to be found and had to give his approval for the ambulance to go to Quiche. (A trip to Quiche takes the ambulance out of service in the community for several hours.) Approval granted. As the city council member was rounding up the bomberos, Rachel Ficker pulled up on another four wheeler and said that the family changed their minds again and were taking the old lady home, presumably to die.

Oh, and during clinic, every few minutes, we had to go check on Juana, the baby that the Fickers took in after clinic in San Andres last week. You may remember that this baby is 3 months old and weighs less than 7 lbs.

Leslie was a neo-natal ICU nurse, so she has an extensive amount of experience with sick kids. When we first saw the baby in clinic last week, she was obviously malnourished, so Leslie took her in and started her on the feeding tube. On checking her sats (the percentage of oxygen in the blood vs. what it can hold), they discovered that the baby needed to be on oxygen, too. Before long, it became apparent that the reason the baby wasn't growing was because she has some serious health problems.

Picture number 2 is of Heidi and Leslie studying the baby with our ultrasound. Not only does the heart appear to be abnormal, but the liver takes up about half of her gut. This is a very serious problem, meaning that this baby is probably not going to make it without some serious intervention (surgical and/or divine). The Fickers are leaving for two weeks, starting tomorrow, for their son's wedding in the U.S. Therefore, the baby cannot stay at their house. Truthfully, even if they were staying, at this point, they have done pretty much everything they can do at their house. The baby needs a hospital.

Naturally, during all of this, there is family drama. The baby's mother is 18 years old and speaks about a dozen words of Spanish. She and her husband were not getting along and her parents were trying to help her. At one point during the afternoon, her husband had arrived and talked with her for a while, then she told him to leave and that she and the baby were moving back in with her parents.

We took her and the baby to her parents' house in Xujeyup, a tiny village outside San Andres, Saturday evening. It turns out that her in-laws are her parents' neighbors. Lovely. Anyway, her dad, who speaks some Spanish, was informed that the situation was very serious and that they needed to get the baby to a hospital. (Mom didn't want to go by herself, as she doesn't speak Spanish and the hospital in Quiche has a reputation among Mayans as being a bad place to go.) His choices were to take the baby to Quiche or to take the baby to Guatemala City. We left the baby and mom with him and returned to the Fickers' in Canilla.

Later that evening (after dark), we got a phone call from the mom's father (the baby's grandpa) saying that the baby was very, very sick and that they wanted to bring her back to us. That not really being an option, we offered to come get the baby and take her to Quiche. Recall that the roads were REALLY bad during the day when it was sunny. At this point, it was dark and raining like crazy. But a dying baby is a dying baby, so we (Heidi and Matt) said a quick prayer and got in the truck.

Forty-five minutes (and about six miles) later, we were sitting in front of the chuch where the family said they'd be (they live a fair distance from the main road - the main road is marginally passable - their road is plain scary). Church was in session at 11pm on a Saturday night, but about half of the chuch members came out to see what the gringos in the truck were up to on a rainy night in Xejuyup. They all knew about the sick baby, but didn't know where the family was.

Finally, we decided to attempt the drive to the house. About 3/4 of the way there, here comes the mom, the baby, the dad, and the dad's dad in the rain with a flashlight - carrying an umbrella - not over the mom - just carrying it. Mom and Dad have apparently reconciled and all four of them want a ride to the hospital. So three adults and a baby all cram in the backseat of a small pickup truck, along with several bags of theirs and an oxygen tank. The dad had a gift for us - a gallina (a chicken - pronounced "guy-EE-na"). It came with it's own burlap sack and got stowed under Heidi's feet. Matt didn't hear what the dad said was in the bag and when he handed it to him and it started moving, Matt's first thought was that they had put the baby in a sack and were handing it in the window!!! A minor panic moment.

Anyway, the trip commences. After having to instruct grandpa (twice) that we don't spit inside people's vehicles, and teaching mom that when the baby starts to cough, you have to hold the head up a bit, things smoothed out some - but only IN the truck. Outside, the weather was bad, the roads were bad and getting worse. At times, the puddles in the road were more than a foot deep. Finally, rounding a curve and descending to a bridge, there it was. The river had crested the bridge and was flowing FAST. There was really no way to tell how deep it was on the bridge (probably around a foot), but these bridges don't have siderails, they're just slabs. Getting swept off the bridge would not be beneficial to the lives of six humans and a chicken.

Another truck pulled up and Matt talked with the driver some, debating the relative merits of trying to ford a river of unknown depth, and turning back with a very sick baby in the truck. The other driver said he would just go to sleep in his truck (it was about midnight at this point) and hope the river had gone down by the time he woke up. (Remember, also, that the roads were bad already, but were going to get MUCH worse as we drove - the graders hadn't done any more work since that morning.) Finally, we disappointedly decided to turn back. The baby's parents decided to catch a Chicken Bus in the morning, when the weather would be better. Heidi wrote a note explaining the baby's condition as she and Leslie knew it, and told the father to take it with him.

We pulled back up to the Ficker farm at about 1:30am (four hours after leaving)- completely locked out! Heidi climbed the fence to the compound and woke up one of the Guatemalan workers by tapping on her window. She had a key to the front gate and we were able to get the truck in and parked.

Earlier on Saturday, we had promised to cook breakfast for them, since they always cook for us, so at 6:30 on Sunday morning, we got up and headed into the kitchen in the main house to start breakfast. Imagine their surprise to see us in their kitchen! (they thought we were going to stay at our house in Quiche after dropping the baby off in the ER)

So we had an interesting breakfast conversation, telling the story of the night before, and informing them that we would be "re-gifting" this chicken to them, as we have no use for it at our house! The third and fourth pictures are of us with our chicken. (There are more of us chasing the stupid thing around the yard, but we'll save those for another time!)

Sunday clinic in San Andres was typical with our highlight patient being one who had crushed his finger somehow while walking his cows to market. His fingernail was hanging on by a thread and he graciously waited to rip it off until he was in our clinic room. How appetizing. At least Heidi got to play with some blood this weekend.

We finally arrived back in Quiche, after making the mistake of stopping to pick up a passenger at the edge of town in San Andres. One person flagged us down, but about twelve RAN to get in the back of the truck with all their stuff. We have a rule - no more than eight - and NOT with a ton of stuff. Those little springs can only take so much! Guatemalans tend not to appreciate physics, so it was a little difficult to explain that we weren't transporting the entire town back to Quiche, but they finally got it - most with less than loving looks on their faces as they got out.

The last thing we felt up to doing was walking down to the hospital, but we did, and were pleasantly surprised that the mother and the baby were there. (Again, Mayans tend not to want to come to this hospital.) She doesn't speak much Spanish, but at least she knows we're here. Which sometimes is all you can do.

Tomorrow, we're taking the day off. Or so we think....