Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Winding Down


Wow.  We are so very exhausted right now, but happily so after a very full OR schedule for 3 days—We are happy to report that we got out of the OR just before nine last night, and then we didn’t go to the hospital until 8 this morning.  We rounded on our eight patients, and discharged five of them who looked great.  We have prevailed upon the good graces of one of the local doctors to round for us tomorrow morning on the last three and hopefully send them home.  Please be praying for continued healing in their homes.

One of the coolest parts of this trip/mission is that we have so much more follow up and long-term relationship than most other “short-term” trips.  Our patients will come back in a couple of weeks to be seen by one of the nurses here who Dr. Hoak (the general surgeon from the US who has been working here since 2006) has pretty much trained up as a mid-level practitioner at this point—She will review their pathology reports, send me copies of them via email, and call me if there are any concerns or issues.  Very cool and reassuring.

Today we will take a small van up the road about 30 minutes to the town where I used to live, then catch a private plane out to  Canilla, a smaller town a little up north where my friends (basically family by now, though!) the Fickers live.  You can read more about what they do at www.adonaiinternationalministries.org, but they do amazing, amazing work—especially in the medical realm.  They have literally built a whole hospital!  Although we are still praying for staff for the hospital to come—especially OB, anesthesia, and peds.

Apparently as of 8 am there were already 15 patients waiting there to see us, so it looks like we will be busy this afternoon too!  It’s definitely nice to be able to provide occasional OB/GYN consults there, though, so they schedule them in the intervening 3-4 months.  Unfortunately quite a few infertility patients, and then a mix of other things.  We are grabbing a good breakfast before we go, just in case 😉

We will leave you with some pictures from around the hospital... enjoy!

The women's ward... and the overflow ward...



The beautiful courtyard!  By far the hospital's best feature...



And three of the hard-working nurses who take good care of the patients... bless them!



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