Thursday, February 07, 2019

First Clinic Day


So today, as always, was a busy clinic day.  We ended up seeing 22 patients, but unfortunately have at least 10 more to see tomorrow between surgeries that showed up today but were turned away.  Clinic tends to run long because each patient gets a full history and physical (in Spanish), and surgical patients also get consent counseling, financial counseling, labwork (fingersticks plus urines), paperwork for admission, and instructions for the day of surgery.  It can take a while!

And today, we scheduled 11 of our 22 for surgery!  There were at least two more that have surgical issues but don’t quite want surgery yet.  Others were an assortment of “macarena” body aches and pains (when they start telling you their symptoms and pointing to where it hurts and it pretty much literally looks like they are starting the Macarena dance!), a lady who is unmarried and had an elective abortion 26 years ago with pain ever since (likely with a psychological component), a couple of abnormal cervical biopsies, one post-op from October that looked GREAT (thank goodness!), and one lady whose problems were really all due to her diabetes that is out of control.  (For you medical types, she had a Hemoglobin A1C of 12.4!)

Surgeries scheduled for the next few days include:

1 LEEP
1 Partial Colpocleiesis
6 vaginal hysterectomies with prolapse repairs (what I lovingly refer to as a “Vag-a-Thon”!)
2 abdominal hysterectomies

1 removal of a prolapsed fibroid—who has a hemoglobin of 7!!  She has been bleeding for 2 years straight, y’all… and we were sooooo happy to be able to diagnose the fibroid and not cervical cancer which had been suspected on a recent ultrasound!

Please pray especially for one of our vaginal repairs patients.  Her name is Aura, and she was in tears in clinic today asking for prayer for her and her husband, who she thinks is having an affair with another lady in their church!  He ended up showing up at the end of the appointment after we had explained and arranged everything with her—so of course we got to kind of start over with him!  And this is why many more than 20 just doesn’t work in the day.

We did manage to get some photos today of some of these special women, and a few from around the hospital.  I will share those in a separate blog post hopefully still tonight, but want to go ahead and upload this since the pictures take a bit longer!

Thanks for your prayers and well-wishes this week.  Let us know if there is anything you want to hear more about!

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