Monday Clinic Day

Today was our "cada quince dias" (every two weeks) clinic in Nueva Santa Catarina. It was a relatively slow clinic day with probably 15-20 patients, but some interesting ones. We're starting to see some "repeat customers" and it's wonderful to be able to pull up their histories on our computer and share some quality time with them. It's also nice to be able to see progress in some of the more chronic patients. One diabetes patient, we think, is going to be controllable on oral meds, rather than insulin, which is VERY expensive and quite hard to get.

Not quite sure why this first picture decided to embed in the middle of our text, but here's a picture of a very sweet family with Matilde (the pastor and translator) in the church clinic.

We're working on backing off some hypertension meds on another patient because his blood pressure measures just fine (a little low, actually), and he's complaining that he get's light headed when he stands up too fast.

We heard that one of our patients we referred to the Guatemalan eye team that visits Quiche every two weeks was able to go and was treated quite well. This is WONDERFUL news! Eye problems are very common here and we've referred several patients.

During clinic, a woman came in and said that she bought a number for her husband (that's how we control clinics, is by selling numbers for Q2 each - about $0.26) but that he couldn't be there. When we asked why, she said that he had broken his leg and was in bed at home. Matilde knew where they lived, more or less, and told us it was fairly close. So we decided to make a house call after the clinic.

Picture #2 is of Matt carrying Heidi's doctor bag towards the house. It turned out that he had a pretty good bump on his ankle, but had good movement and indicated that he could walk on it a little bit and that it was improving since he fell a week ago. On exam, it looked and felt a lot more like a good sprain than a break, but we told him that if he wasn't walking a whole lot better in another week that he needed to get an X-Ray. A few pain meds and an ACE bandage and we were on our way.

Picture #3 is of Sandra, the daughter of one of the church members. She is SOOO cute and friendly. She actually went on the house call with us. If you ever wanted a postcard of a really sweet Guatemalan child, she'd be the one to pose for it. So here's a sample.

And picture #4 is of the gas station we stopped at on the way home from clinic. It's not every day you see the "Thanks Be To God Gas Station", so we pulled in.

Tomorrow is our "day off", so we'll be going in to town to work on getting a PO Box (wish us luck!), grocery shopping at the market, and further toning our aging bodies (Matt found a weight room and Heidi is using the ultra-high-tech shoes her dad bought her for running. No kidding. Heidi has running shoes that actually talk to her iPod. Go figure.)