Some Fun Before We Go...

Oh, how nice it was to get everybody out of the Operating Room and all of the scheduled patients seen before noon today! Monica was nice enough to help Tom with a hernia repair surgery he had scheduled which gave me time to finish up the consult patients and be ready for our second case. She was a young lady with a breast mass that is almost definitely not cancer-- we were able to remove it under just local anesthesia, which she appreciated since she would like to be back at work as a teacher tomorrow!

All of patients-- thanks be to God!-- looked pretty good this morning when we rounded, and slightly better even this afternoon before we left the hospital. I will check on them again this evening, and hopefully send them all home tomorrow and not have to leave Tom stuck rounding on anyone.

We then treated ourselves to a nice buffet lunch together, which really was a treat considering how little time Pat, Monica, and I have had together all three of us at all! We picked up a few last minute "needs" in the market and this afternoon are mostly cleaning up and planning for tomorrow.

We are still praying for negative pathology reports (i.e., telling us it's not cancer) on Nohemi, Maria, and another Maria especially, so please keep those especially in your prayers.

We still don't have a straight story on the lady that came in "just for an ultrasound" and we found the postmenopausal ovarian mass, but we are fairly certain she does NOT know Christ (although she considers herself Catholic, her neighbors consider her also to be a "witch"-- and unfortunately the Catholic Church down here has suffered from so much syncretism that those two are not mutually exclusive anymore!) We also found out that her son actually owns one of our favorite restaurants in town, so we did ask her to kindly pay her whole bill and not just the tiny bit she claimed to be able to pay before she left. This she did, to her credit, without grumbling-- I guess she knew she was essentially "busted".

It is always frustrating to know that would certainly not have been the first time we were taken advantage of by people who really do have the money to pay for their services, but the "Serenity Prayer" has been the only thing that has ever helped me come to grips with that in my years here...

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference..."

I hope that my Grannie is looking down and smiling on me quoting those words I first learned from her needlepoint sampler that still hangs in her old apartment, as I struggle to truly rely on God's sovereignty even in our human need for his unending Grace at every level.

Amen.

Oh-- and the pics are mostly just for fun today... One is a "paycheck" from one of the patients, that brought us these beautiful plums from their tree (one of my all-time favorite Guatemalan treats!), one is of Pat feeding the Parrots at the restaurant (tortillas, of course! What else would a Guatemalan Parrot eat?!), and then there's the beautiful view out the back window of the resaturant (Try to imagine if that were a real waterfall and not just a "waterfall of trash" as one of our students once dubbed it ;-), and the other is just some of the patients waiting around to get well! Thanks be to God that they are indeed well on their way...