Day One in Clinic!

Enough with the clinic already!

Wow.  Like seriously—enough!  We had 36 patients show up (25 is really, really hard to get through in a day…) and ended up sending a few in the afternoon home to come back tomorrow. We saw 28, and of those we scheduled an unprecedented 12 surgeries for the next 3 days!  I have never, ever filled up all of the possible surgeries we could do on the first day—AND we sent two others home to come back for surgery in February because we simply don’t have time to operate on them!  It’s good to be needed and wanted, but we were begging for mercy by the end…

The team rocked it out, of course—there’s a LOT that goes in to bringing a patient in, getting a history from scratch, writing it up in Spanish, doing a full physical exam (insert gynecologist-with-a-stethoscope joke here…), determining the plan, counseling the patient, often doing an ultrasound, getting the urine dipped or urine pregnancy test, vital signs, and finger stick—not to mention surgical consent and financial counseling about the costs—on each patient all in the same small room! 

Here are some of the “stats” for the day—

·       We’ve already said 28 patients, 14 surgeries

·       One lady whose chief complaint (at age 52) was that her back hurts when she chops firewood!  God bless her.  Wasn’t really sure how to fix that one…

·       One patient that had 11 babies—today’s record

·       Four pathology specimens sent from clinic today (biopsies and such)

·       Only two or three calls to Dr. Hoak for help 😉  He’s the general surgeon here that I thank God for daily

·       One fistula—if you don’t know what that is, you don’t want to.  Or according to Dr. Nikki, “just know that urine in the vagina is no good; poop in the vagina is even worse”… Sorry for that.  I told you it was Nikki…

·       One case of depression, unfortunately—pretty severe, unfortunately.  Please pray she can find a good Church and friends for support

The rest of the stories will have to wait for when we get home… sorry; we are tired.

Will try to post some pics if Nikki can send me some from her phone; wish us luck!