Days 3-4 From Dr. Chris Deluca

"Days 3-4"

Good morning to all! Well we are going into our 4th day here and a little tired, but for the most part doing well... starting to get used to the loud noises at night that our Guatemalan friends seem to love so much... *lol*

Yesterday went well, but a little slower than I would have liked. Our Guatemalan anesthesiologist (who is fantastic and wrote my post-op orders by the way... awesome!) showed up on Guatemalan time at 9:30 rather than 8 (actually not bad because I believe last time I was here there was one day it was around noon) so we didn't get started as quickly as I would like in the OR, BUT the cases we did went WONDERFULLY! Kent did my first case with me that was a decently extensive vaginal hysterectomy with repairs like he had been in the OR for years... someone needs to get that boy out of Emergency Medicine and into a surgical subspecialty quick! Got out of that just before lunch. During my cases my other 2 remaining med students had been in clinic getting histories and doing basic exams on patient so between cases, we squeezed in 2-3 patients for exams/plans. Not a lot of surgical candidates, mostly benign stuff... the only one we tried really hard to convince was a sweet old lady with pretty decent prolapse and CIN II on biopsy a year or so ago, that Heidi had attempted a pessary fitting on previously... we got a better pessary for her that she promptly declined, and then when we counselled her on surgery, she stated she wanted a few months to think about it... we did (I think, I hope) convince her to repeat her cervical screening and come back in May. Our second case was by far the most impressive case of prolapse I have ever seen... this poor sweet lady had apparently been dealing with it for about 15 years too... took about 3 hours, but I am happy to say, I think we got a GREAT result... Victoria also did a great job with the assist and a very tough case was made very reasonable as a result. I learned that gasas are lap sponges and that piencas campos are towel clips, however I still haven't figured out what sponge stick is after about a half dozen tries... *lol* Alma, our Guatemalan scrub tech does pretty well with "este, por favor" thankfully! We got out around 5 though from clinic which is pretty early and had an AMAZING dinner and a little ice cream for dessert... the little things in life. :-)

So for today, as always, pray for opportunities to share with and love on the ladies we will see today. Pray for more opportunities (and the RIGHT opportunites) to serve today as clinic was pretty slow yesterday. Pray for the lovely lady we are operating on this morning and the ones we did yesterday as well. Pray that each of us here would be CHALLENGED by this trip and come away knowing something new about the God we serve. THANKS for the prayer! It means SOOOOO much! God bless all!

Chris