Good Weekend

We hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. We certainly did. As you can see from our previous post, we had a very eventful Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Of course, we didn't have to brave any of the malls or post-holiday sales, which we are TRULY thankful for!

We commented on how Friday started in our previous post, but after we wrote, we had time to go down to the hospital to check on a few patients. Lesly, the Down's Sydrome baby we brought in with severe malnutrition is now on a feeding tube. Normally, that would not be considered good news, but we have been told that that is very uncommon here and it's probably her best chance for survival. She's too weak to eat, so "direct deposit" of nutrition in her little belly is great news.

After checking in on Lesly and her mom (who was in much better spirits than before), we stopped by to see Manuela Ordonez, the woman who we brought in with the suspected molar pregnancy (that turned out to be a spontaneous abortion). Praise God, she had received her surgery and gone home! A previous patient waited a week and a half for her surgery and Manuela was in and out in two days!!

While we were in maternity, however, we decided to ask about the woman we referred from ASELSI whose baby had not grown in six weeks. She had checked in that morning and was there with her husband, waiting for an assessment by the local doctors. YAY for patients listening to our advice and coming to get help!!!

Saturday morning, we got up early (it was hard - the temperature in our bedroom was in the mid-40s!) and drove to Canilla for clinic with Leslie and Katie. The Fickers were helping to pack up the houseguests they had from the U.S. for Thanksgiving and were getting ready to fly them back to Guatemala City for their flight home. So Katie and Heidi handled most of the clinic to help Leslie. It was a relatively quiet clinic, since there was a "Feria" (fair) in town. The good news was that on our way to Canilla, we picked up some riders (very typical) and one of them was the Cotton Candy man. We never accept money for the rides we offer, but he paid us with a bag of cotton candy. That was a first - and yummy, too!

Saturday afternoon, after helping Duane land and park the plane at the hangar (after dropping off their family friends, he went grocery shopping and then picked up a local family from the airport and brought them back to Canilla), we got a call from Lydia's family that her mother was very sick in childbirth.

As you may have read, the Fickers took in a little girl named Martina who is mentally disabled and had been burned very badly when she seized and fell into a fire. Lydia is the 16-year-old girl who they hired to be Martina's full-time caretaker. Her mother lives about a 15 minute drive and another 15 minute walk up into the mountains.

So we jumped into the truck and raced into the mountains. Unfortunately, as they were calling us, the baby was being born, arm first, and died before the mid-wife could get her out. So we arrived at the house to see them cleaning up a dead baby. We checked on Mom, who was exhausted (mid-wives often have moms start pushing the minute they go into labor, so they are BEAT by the time the baby is born). We were no more than 50 yards back up the mountain on our way out before they started yelling for us to come back. Mom was seizing.

Unfortunately, the house they live in has no electricity and practically no natural light, and Mom was in a back corner where we couldn't see at all. We had them move her to where we could see a little better and when they got her off the bed, she collapsed. Matt scooped her up and carried her to another bed where there was more light. When he stood up, he was covered in blood. Not good.

Apparently, Mom had not eaten in about two days, was exhausted, and was bleeding. Heidi did whatever it is that doctors do when they don't have much for medicine (you can tell Matt is writing this!) and when we left, Mom was drinking some sugar water and eating some egg soup, which seemed like a drastic improvement from 20 minutes before. We told Lydia to call us if she needed more help. The phone never rang, so we can assume Mom did better after that!

Today was an average day in clinic in San Andres. Our translators' great-grandmother came in with what appears to be a surgical gall bladder, so we will refer her to Dr. Hoak (if you're still thinking about donating money to his fund, this is the type of thing that his presence allows us to do - without him in Chichicastenango, we would have very few options for this woman.)

Tomorrow we are back in Nueva Santa Catarina. It'll probably be quite cold there, since it's at 10,000 feet altitude and it's been pretty cold here (at only 6700 feet). Also, please pray for clear weather in the Zona Reina region. Duane is hoping to fly there tomorrow and scout out locations for us to land to do a two-day clinic on Friday-Saturday of this week. The people there are even poorer than the people here and have ZERO access to medical care. It can take more than a day to get there (assuming you can get there at all) across some very tough mountains unless you have a plane. Then it's about 18 minutes. Luckily, God has provided a plane. So off we go. Please, God, clear weather!!!