Agape In Action: Catching Up...

OK, a little bit of catch up work this morning—I was a little too lazy to blog last night, but mostly just because I was enjoying great fellowship with the team over dinner and then stargazing here on the roof! The week has been going very well, and the pace has been much less overwhelming than usual. Even to the point that I would appreciate your prayers about the direction of the mission right now—I really hope that only three gynecologic surgeries this week is just a total fluke and not an indicator of some problem with our reputation or the integrity of our ministry! Tom is seeing and sending me plenty of prolapse patients, but literally none of them showed up this time. Maybe it just means we’ll be really slammed in August when I’ll hopefully have another gynecologist helping, though!

So Monday we saw another eight or so patients (a very light Monday also by historical standards) in between our two cases, which both went outstandingly well. We repaired one lady’s prolapsed bladder, and she looks great post-operatively despite being over 70 years old and fairly debilitated for her age.

The other case was definitely my favorite new experience of the week—We tried out the “new” laparoscopic equipment here, and ended up doing a beautiful para-ovarian cystectomy case that was really truly the ideal laparoscopic case—a young girl, with pain concerns, thin, healthy, with a cyst that was really mobile and just kind of hanging off of the end of the ovary—no tough dissection or anything, and it would have really pained me to make a big incision in her abdomen just for that! We will pray that Olga feels better now after surgery, and we’ll be able to follow up with her through the Fickers who sent her. For those of you interested, there are some screen pics below in the last post—Keep in mind that the equipment is a little older, but more importantly, these are photos of the screen which accounts for some of the quality loss.

Tuesday we saw another 11 patients, and helped Tom with a gallbladder—then settled in for our long case of the day, which we were kind of “hoping” was an endometrial (uterine) cancer that would be relatively easy to dissect out. It turned out to be a pretty nasty ovarian cancer, with a question of ALSO having cervical cancer—rare and confusing for us. I am looking forward to reviewing the pathology and talking the case over with expert colleagues, but more importantly please be praying for Marta, who has a quite deadly disease at this point. She is a Christian, and lost her husband several years back, but still has plenty of family here that really don’t want to lose her! She is only 42 years old, which is looking younger and younger to me all the time as I am only a couple of years behind her ;-)

We’ll see what today brings—I’m hoping to get over to Quiche to pick up some things we had to leave down here last trip because we were overweight in Duane’s plane, and who knows what else the Lord will send us? We’ll be helping Tom with four cases in the OR today also.

Some highlight stories from clinic before I sign off:

· Juana’s chief complaint was that she has burning in the vaginal area, which she figures probably has something to do with the time that her uterus fell out and landed on the floor once—about fifty years ago! She had to have some ladies help her get it back in, apparently. Luckily now she only has a yeast infection, but some of the histories we get here are pretty convoluted and tough to work through sometimes!

· Lucia had been told by some doctor in the Guatemalan medical system that she needed to have both her uterus and gallbladder removed to relieve the sensation of pins and needles she was feeling in her LEFT, UPPER part of her abdomen—nowhere near those organs! Pretty sure that was a case of operating for what we call a “positive wallet biopsy” down here, since she paid for a CT scan before her consult that day!

· Alicia was told that her white discharge during pregnancy caused her son’s eye infections as a baby—now chlamydia can do that so we treated her and her husband just in case, but now she is thoroughly paranoid about a very normal finding in pregnancy! It was pretty fun to diagnose her live little 7 week pregnancy by ultrasound, though—that is always a joy.

Just a small sampling for you of the fun days behind and ahead!

Speaking of random sampling, here are today's pictures--

"Decisions, decisions"-- the assortment of laparoscopic trocars available...