ASELSI Thursday

Tuesday, we took some time to run down to Antigua, relax, and do some Christmas shopping. We had a nice dinner there and spent the night in a hotel we found during our stay with the cleft palate kids last year. On Wednesday morning, Matt ran over to the Guatemala City airport to leave our heavy luggage for the trip back to the US on Monday. Since we have to leave our truck for Paul and Lindsey, Duane is going to fly us to the airport on Monday morning and there's not room in the plane for all our stuff.

Wednesday afternoon, Heidi had a quick surgery in Chichi. You may or may not remember the patient she had a while ago in whom they accidently cut her ureter. (When you're dealing with a 10 lb uterus, things are not always where they're supposed to be.) Well, to repair the ureter, they had to put in a stint - basically a plastic tube that serves as the ureter while the ureter is healing. Eventually, that stint has to come out. And thanks to Dr. Flavia Horth and the Wichita Falls team, we now have a tool to remove that stint without opening the patient back up again. The surgery went quickly and without complication.

Thursday morning, we headed to ASELSI for our last clinic of the year there. We saw several prenatal patients, a few new babies (whose moms were patients of ours during their pregnancies), a couple of cleft kids, and a microtia (it's an ear problem) kid. Heidi and Virginia have been working very hard to plan the cleft/microtia trip for this January. All of the preliminary work has to be done before we leave next week. So pretty much all of the kids and their families had to be reached (not always easy here - not everyone has a phone and some that do don't speak Spanish) and told where to be and when to get their pre-op labs done. Then all of the logistics to transport a dozen or so kids and their parents to Antigua for the surgery had to be done. Virginia and Sharon will be helping to arrange all of the labs and transport while we're on our way back in January. Like last year, we'll meet the kids in Antigua. (Also, thanks to Matt Capehart for loaning us his school bus to get everyone there!)

We did have a few interesting patients today. One was a 28 year old woman with high blood pressure. She appears to be in great shape but clearly something is wrong. We sent her for some studies, some of which we'll have to help her pay for. She's single and her dad has already died, so she really has no financial support at all.

Another patient came in as a prenatal patient but it appears that her baby has died at about 3 months gestation. She is 39 years old and this is her 14th pregnancy. She has 10 living children. Her husband has given her permission to go on birth control after this baby. Unfortunately, there won't be a living baby here. We prayed for her in clinic and she seems to be taking this rather stoically, but we know that it's very bad news.

Another patient is desperately seeking to get pregnant. She came in a month or so ago with her husband and we sent them both to get some lab tests. It was a little uncomfortable to discuss the sample procedure her husband had to go through, but he was very supportive and didn't complain, though we did get about a tenth of a second of a weird look! She came in today with the test results and it looks like there are no hormonal problems with either one of them. So we're suggesting a basal body temperature test for the month while we're gone. We'll look at the results when we get back and try to figure out the next step. We reminded her that throughout the Bible, there are many, many stories of couples who wanted kids and prayed and prayed and prayed and finally had them. Sometimes, persistence is the key.

Yet another patient came in with a story of post-menopausal bleeding. This is almost never good news. Heidi couldn't find anything obvious on exam, but she is so twisted and bent with arthritis and just old age that it's not unlikely that she's got some other badness going on. She's not exactly the best candidate for surgery, though, so we talked about prayer with them, too.

Our last patient of the day was a nine year old boy who is deaf and mute. He's also mentally retarded. He had had some type of plastic surgery to remove some scarring on his foot so he can wear shoes. Our job was to remove the sutures. It was pretty hard because it's hard to communicte with him and tell him what we're going to do, to encourage him, and to commend him for being so brave. We basically had to just hold him down and let Heidi work. He did really well and got a sucker for his trouble. He really liked Isaac, though. Isaac was having one of his good day/bad day days in which he's okay for a few minutes, then not. He and this little boy did take time to smile at each other, though.

Well, tomorrow is Heidi's clinic at Buen Samaritano, then this weekend is our last weekend in Canilla before we leave for Christmas. My, how time flies. We haven't been to the United States since April and that was only for a few days for a wedding.

Our plans will take us to Houston, Dallas, St. Louis, southern Michigan, Cleveland, Salisbury, NC, Raleigh, maybe to Atlanta, then back to Houston. All on the road. Wish us luck!