Saturday, June 23, 2018

Sabado!


Sorry for the lapse last night—we were pretty tired! Three full major OR cases yesterday, and we finished up around 7pm or so… then grabbed supper and definitely headed for bed.  The three cases went really well and smoothly, but were quite time-consuming. 

Today, we went to round on our patients—they are all doing fairly well, although we are a little worried about sweet Rafaela—she seems to have lost more blood than we feel like we saw at the time of surgery, and we are watching her closely in case of a hidden (retroperitoneal) bleed.  Tonight she still looked quite stable, but please send up a little prayer for her expedited healing.  I’ll probably end up giving her a bag of my blood in the morning—thankfully, God has blessed me with O negative blood that the Red Cross won’t accept because of my frequent Guatemalan travels!

Then down in clinic we only had two patients—our sweet little 31 week preeclamptic lady (who is, unfortunately, looking more and more preeclamptic…) and a little teenager worried about her cycles.  Yesterday was a little more interesting at least—our last patient of the day (who waited from 8am to after 4pm to see us!) had a complaint of headaches and feeling “sweet” around her mouth!  Being gynecologists and all, we did our best to treat her ailments on the opposite end of her body from where we specialize!   Not sure we took care fully of the “feeling sweet around her mouth”, though?!?!

Today’s surgeries also went smoothly, and were really quite a lot of fun.  We had an older lady with a prolapse, then a younger lady with a more challenging uterus to remove vaginally.  I may or may not have stolen the second one from Kathryn a little 😉  They looked good this evening, so hopefully they will look great tomorrow and be ready for discharge before we leave on Monday.

Today was also Naomi’s birthday, so of course we had to go overboard for that!  We had the hospital staff help us surprise her with a cake and a piñata for a nice traditional Guatemalan celebration!  I thought it was pretty nice of us not to wake her up at 3am with firecrackers outside of her window, which is another quite traditional Guatemalan way of celebrating…

Here’s some pictures to try to keep things interesting…
Naomi being tortured by us trying to bust the piñata... (don't worry; we all go our turns!!)


A couple of views of the central marketplace in Chichi from a balcony where we enjoyed a hot chocolate this afternoon...


 
And an amazing photo Kathryn took in the restaurant where we went for a little night on the town tonight!  It was truly lovely...

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