Patience and Patients

We are still (not so) patiently waiting for our container. Yesterday's visit to Guatemala City has not rescued it just yet. Today's emergency was the "urgent" need for three more pages of the inventory translated into Spanish. The exact same three pages were sent over a week ago, but we sent them again today. Keep smiling! There's obviously a reason this thing hasn't come yet, we just don't know what it is.


Monday in clinic, we met a woman with two kids who both had inguinal hernias. If you really want to know, you can look it up, but don't be suprised when you see the pictures. One of her kids is 5 and the other is 2. She speaks very little Spanish, but we learned from Roy (the pastor there in Chinique) that she is a relatively recent widow. She has five kids, but just these two have the hernias. She didn't have the $0.75 for the clinic visit, so we obviously waived that.


The boys need surgery to correct their hernias, so we told her about Dr. Hoak at the Hospital Buen Samaritano. She told us she couldn't afford the $1.50 for bus fare or the $1.30 consult fee at the hospital. So Pastor Roy brought her and her kids to our house this morning and Heidi gave them a ride to Chichicastenango. Dr. Hoak did their surgeries today. They'll be released tomorrow and since we'll already be in Chichicastenango for clinic at ASELSI, we'll probably give them a ride back to Quiché and Roy will bring them back to Chinique.



The Bible very clearly tells us that we have a responsibility to care for widows and orphans and this lady and her kids obviously qualify for some extra assistance. The total cost for the surgeries will run over $1000 and we will take every dime out of our indigent assistance fund. (Normally we ask patients to contribute what they can afford to contribute and we cover the rest.)





We are now having difficulty reaching our breast cancer patient, Maria Suy Chan. Cell phones change hands rather quickly here sometimes and when we tried to call her today, someone else answered the phone and didn't know who she was. Please continue to pray for her and her unborn baby.


We got a confusing pathology report back on the lady whose uterus Heidi took out last week. She came in for surgery with two tests indicating early cervical cancer, but the pathology on the uterus itself was "non-cancerous". Hmmm.... Sometimes pathology is wrong. Now you wonder which way this particular one is wrong. Either the last one was wrong or the first two were. What to do? In any case, she is no longer in any danger of dying from cervical or uterine cancer. We just have to figure out whether or not she is in need of further treatment.


Also please remember to pray for our patient in San Andrés who is 18 weeks pregnant but broke her water two weeks ago. Her baby's heart was still beating on Sunday and her infection was getting better, but she is a long way from being out of the woods.



Tomorrow, we should see all of our cleft lip patients again. They will be about six weeks post surgery and we should get a very good idea what the final outcome of their surgeries will be. Ricardo, our double cleft patient, received his surgery this week through Dr. Lisa Dunham and her organization, Health Talents. Dr. Dunham and her husband live and work in Chichicastenango and had access to a pediatric anesthesiologist and a plastics team in Mazatenango and that's where Ricardo got his surgery. As you may recall, Ricardo was a twin who was abandoned by his mother. The lady pictured with him there is not even a relative. She simply told the mother not to let him die, that she would take him. You'll see in the last pic that they didn't do much for his hair, but his lip looks a whole lot better!