Hello everyone! I’m sorry it has been so long since I’ve written. Life has been pretty busy here in Tena with the therapy program, but I’ve got a little bit of down time because the physical therapist is on vacation visiting her family in the United States, so I thought I’d write you all an update.
Before Nicole left for her vacation we had a pretty hectic time, because we were trying to get in as many patients as we could and we were also busy conducting our study. For those of you who don’t know, we are looking at the characteristics of the cerebral palsy population that comes to therapy sessions at the hospital. So, for the week and a half before Nicole left I did one-on-one questionnaires with the mother of just about every patient who walked through our door. I created the questionnaire that we used with Nicole’s guidance (and her fiancé’s help with the Spanish wordings). We asked questions about the families’ socioeconomic status, the mothers’ pregnancies and the children’s births and health in the first months and years of life. Some of the patients were really easy to interview, but some were much harder because of lacking Spanish skills – both theirs and mine! Many of the mothers speak Kichwa as their first language and so their Spanish isn’t very good. Combine that with my non-native Spanish speaking, and some of the questionnaires…well, lets just say I’m not sure how accurate some of the details are. The questionnaires were interesting for me sociologically though. I learned so much through them about life in the developing world. Lots of the patients don’t have light, running water, or indoor or outdoor toilets. Most of the women didn’t attend enough prenatal check-ups because of lack of access to the hospital or lack of education about their importance. And a few women likely have disabled children because they tried to abort their kids, usually because their husband or boyfriend (or father) didn’t want them to have a baby. Abortion is illegal here – which means more that it is expensive than that it doesn’t happen – so the poor mothers turn to taking herbs from shamans, injecting easily-accessed drugs like pitocin early in their pregnancies, or beating their stomachs. Hearing about what these women (or their partners) did to try to cause abortions, and seeing the results in their disabled children, is one of the strongest arguments for legalizing safe abortions that I could ever experience.
In the next week, I’ll be analyzing data and writing the majority of the paper that Nicole and I want to put together. Nicole comes back from the US on Saturday or Sunday, and next Monday we will resume therapy sessions. I will either have my last day be next Thursday or Friday, depending on when I head back to Quito. The roads have been bad between Tena and Quito lately – two weekends ago there were so many landslides from the rainy weather we’ve been having that there was no way to pass from one city to the other. So, if by next Wednesday the roads aren’t looking so hot, I’m going to have to buy a plane ticket for Friday’s flight from Tena to Quito just to make sure I can get to the US on Sunday! If the roads are OK though, I’ll take a bus early Saturday morning.
In the non-therapy, non-anxious-to-get-home aspects of my life, I’ve been running a lot and this past Friday afternoon I ran 3 miles for time and, shockingly, ran the distance in 25:51! I had no idea I could do that, so that was pretty cool! That night I went to the Gallera, which is Tena’s discoteca, to see an all-girl group of Vallenato singers from Colombia (Vallenato, I learned that night, is a style of music that is usually sad and romantic, though it didn’t sound all that mournful to me). As usual, since there were drunk Ecuadorian and Colombian men around, I got hit on a little bit. And by “a little bit,” I mean that one guy told me that his dream in life was to be with a North American women, two more “jokingly” called Gaby their future mothers-in-law, and a fourth guy, this fat 40-something who I used to (until Friday) wave to on the track when I ran, couldn’t take the hint to leave me alone. Thank goodness Gaby played wingman for me with him. If there is one thing I won’t miss about Ecuador, it is the machismo.
I did start feeling some premature nostalgia at the concert though, knowing that in two weeks good Latin music won’t be found at the local bar for a four dollar cover that includes a drink, but will instead be something I’ll have to seek out on special occasions. I was surprised at myself in a happy way, because these days I mostly can’t wait to hop on a plane and get back to Minnesota.
Anyway, this is getting pretty long and I’ve got a date to chat with Zach on Skype, so I’m going to get going. As always, if you want to chat with me send me an email, though I suppose you could also wait approximately 12 days and 22 hours to do it in person. Ciao!
Monday, July 2, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
It´s been awhile.
Hello to everyone! It has been quite some time since I last wrote, so I’m sorry about that. The time since I have written has been really busy. I finished my classes and turned in my final 32-page paper (written in Spanish) and did my final presentation on May 10th.
When I was all done with my work, Kristin came and visited me for a week! She flew in on Sunday the 13th, then on Monday morning Kristin, my friend Nora and I flew to Guayaquil, which is near the coast and hopped on a bus to the beach town of Puerto Lopez. We got in there around 4 and decided to take a swim before the sun went down. Just as we decided to get out of the water, I got stung on my foot by a stingray! My foot started bleeding from the barb and I hobbled to a beachside drink stand in hopes of cleaning off my foot and letting it rest awhile while I had caipiriña. Unfortunately, at the drink stand we found an old Ecuadorian guy who seemed helpful at first, but then he ended up rubbing sand in my foot and slapping it! Thankfully, Nora jumped in and told him to please get his hands off my foot, thankyouverymuch. The drink stand guy was much more helpful. He brought me a bowl of water to wash my foot, caipiriñas for all, and even gave me a free shot of alcohol to clean out the wound. Thanks, drink guy!
The next day we headed from Puerto Lopez to Isla de la Plata, known as the “poor man’s Galapagos.” We hiked around the island with a guide and saw blue- and red-footed boobies (which have red feet but a blue beak) and frigates. After a few hours of that, we ate some lunch (Kristin had an unfortunate experience with a moldy cheese sandwich) and had the opportunity to go snorkeling in the ocean above a recovering white coral reef. It was the first time I’ve snorkeled since I went to Mexico during my senior year of high school, and was a much better experience! I felt very comfortable in the water and recognized a lot of the same species of fish as in the Yucatan Peninsula. I also saw a small bottom-feeding shark and a stingray, though that one didn’t sting me . Dad, after that snorkeling I think I could be convinced to get scuba certified. Especially if it means going on a dive trip with you!
That night we headed for Montañita, aka Ecuador beach cartoonland. It is a really chill little beach town, but everything there seems like it is out of comic book - especially our hotel, called the Tiki Limbo Lounge. I enjoyed it after my semester, and I think Kristin did too (especially after the cheese sandwich) because we got a very tasty dinner and the next day had one of the best vegetarian lunches of my life for about 5 bucks total between the two of us. Amazing. Nora had to leave that morning, so after she did Kristin and I went for a run and then to the beach to take a dip. We left after lunch for Guayaquil. We got in around 5, found a hotel, and headed to the Malecón, which is a renewal project along the riverbank that ended up forcing lots of people from their homes without compensation. It is gated and heavily policed, and while it was beautiful and incredible safe even at night, it felt even more Disney than Montañita. Another thing about Guayaquil – I think Kristin and I got catcalled more times in the space of the 30 minutes it took to reach the Malecón than in all of the rest of my semester put together. I feel like after that evening I would be happy to never return to Guayaquil again.
We flew back to Quito Thursday morning and spent the day going to the Basilica and one other very shiny baroque-style church, and poking around Old Town. That night we hit one of my favorite cheap restaurants, an Argentine place called Cha Cha’s that mainly serves $2 pizzas and $1.50 glasses of wine. Other than some unwelcome rain, I think we both left that day feeling pretty satisfied.
Friday Kristin and I took a bus to Otavalo and then headed to Cotacachi, a town known for its leather, to go purse shopping. What do you know, we each found a purse without a problem. Importantly, we also found a very tasty banana split.
Every Saturday in Otavalo is a huge market day in the Plaza de los Ponchos, so Kristin and I went shopping there, too. We found tapestries and all sorts of crafts. I finished my Christmas shopping, so I hope you’re all ready to get Ecuadorian Christmas gifts!
Saturday afternoon Kristin and I hopped on a bus and came back to Quito. It passed right by my house on the way back, so we got off there and headed to the Parque Carolina for a jog. Kristin did amazingly, even at more than 9,000 feet! That evening we went to Café Mosaico and enjoyed its great views of Quito at night.
Kristin left the next morning along with a lot of crafts, and I had to get packed because I left Quito the morning of Monday, May 21st to come to Tena for my summer internship. I am here continuing the research that Nicole and I started during my internship phase of the study abroad program. We are going to do a more in-depth look at the causes of cerebral palsy in her patients at the Tena hospital, and we’re planning on comparing our research to data about cerebral palsy’s causes in the US to see the differences. It should be really interesting research, because in the US cerebral palsy is mainly caused by premature birth, but here most of the really premature babies don’t survive. It appears that there are a lot more cases caused by asphyxia during delivery, infections of the mother during pregnancy, and seizures after birth. So, we’ll see how accurate those hypotheses turn out to be.
In my spare time I’ve been running, reading, and watching pirated DVDs. I’ve been more or less keeping up with Mom and Kristin’s training schedule for the ½ marathon. I ran 9 miles on Friday evening, which I think is further than I have ever ran before in one stretch! Maybe when the day of their ½ marathon comes along I’ll do the Tena version that evening on the airport landing strip.
Gaby was out of town this weekend, but tonight she is bringing my little host brother, Francisco, back from visiting his grandparents. I’m really excited to see him – he adds a lot of liveliness to the house! Gaby just had to deal with an unexpected work layoff, but she’s found a new job in Tena with an NGO so I don’t have to worry about them moving on me.
I’ll be coming home on July 15th, which is seven weeks from today (not that I’m counting). I’m enjoying my time here very much, but I also look forward to seeing all of you. I hope you’re doing well – you should shoot me an e-mail to keep my updated on your lives!
When I was all done with my work, Kristin came and visited me for a week! She flew in on Sunday the 13th, then on Monday morning Kristin, my friend Nora and I flew to Guayaquil, which is near the coast and hopped on a bus to the beach town of Puerto Lopez. We got in there around 4 and decided to take a swim before the sun went down. Just as we decided to get out of the water, I got stung on my foot by a stingray! My foot started bleeding from the barb and I hobbled to a beachside drink stand in hopes of cleaning off my foot and letting it rest awhile while I had caipiriña. Unfortunately, at the drink stand we found an old Ecuadorian guy who seemed helpful at first, but then he ended up rubbing sand in my foot and slapping it! Thankfully, Nora jumped in and told him to please get his hands off my foot, thankyouverymuch. The drink stand guy was much more helpful. He brought me a bowl of water to wash my foot, caipiriñas for all, and even gave me a free shot of alcohol to clean out the wound. Thanks, drink guy!
The next day we headed from Puerto Lopez to Isla de la Plata, known as the “poor man’s Galapagos.” We hiked around the island with a guide and saw blue- and red-footed boobies (which have red feet but a blue beak) and frigates. After a few hours of that, we ate some lunch (Kristin had an unfortunate experience with a moldy cheese sandwich) and had the opportunity to go snorkeling in the ocean above a recovering white coral reef. It was the first time I’ve snorkeled since I went to Mexico during my senior year of high school, and was a much better experience! I felt very comfortable in the water and recognized a lot of the same species of fish as in the Yucatan Peninsula. I also saw a small bottom-feeding shark and a stingray, though that one didn’t sting me . Dad, after that snorkeling I think I could be convinced to get scuba certified. Especially if it means going on a dive trip with you!
That night we headed for Montañita, aka Ecuador beach cartoonland. It is a really chill little beach town, but everything there seems like it is out of comic book - especially our hotel, called the Tiki Limbo Lounge. I enjoyed it after my semester, and I think Kristin did too (especially after the cheese sandwich) because we got a very tasty dinner and the next day had one of the best vegetarian lunches of my life for about 5 bucks total between the two of us. Amazing. Nora had to leave that morning, so after she did Kristin and I went for a run and then to the beach to take a dip. We left after lunch for Guayaquil. We got in around 5, found a hotel, and headed to the Malecón, which is a renewal project along the riverbank that ended up forcing lots of people from their homes without compensation. It is gated and heavily policed, and while it was beautiful and incredible safe even at night, it felt even more Disney than Montañita. Another thing about Guayaquil – I think Kristin and I got catcalled more times in the space of the 30 minutes it took to reach the Malecón than in all of the rest of my semester put together. I feel like after that evening I would be happy to never return to Guayaquil again.
We flew back to Quito Thursday morning and spent the day going to the Basilica and one other very shiny baroque-style church, and poking around Old Town. That night we hit one of my favorite cheap restaurants, an Argentine place called Cha Cha’s that mainly serves $2 pizzas and $1.50 glasses of wine. Other than some unwelcome rain, I think we both left that day feeling pretty satisfied.
Friday Kristin and I took a bus to Otavalo and then headed to Cotacachi, a town known for its leather, to go purse shopping. What do you know, we each found a purse without a problem. Importantly, we also found a very tasty banana split.
Every Saturday in Otavalo is a huge market day in the Plaza de los Ponchos, so Kristin and I went shopping there, too. We found tapestries and all sorts of crafts. I finished my Christmas shopping, so I hope you’re all ready to get Ecuadorian Christmas gifts!
Saturday afternoon Kristin and I hopped on a bus and came back to Quito. It passed right by my house on the way back, so we got off there and headed to the Parque Carolina for a jog. Kristin did amazingly, even at more than 9,000 feet! That evening we went to Café Mosaico and enjoyed its great views of Quito at night.
Kristin left the next morning along with a lot of crafts, and I had to get packed because I left Quito the morning of Monday, May 21st to come to Tena for my summer internship. I am here continuing the research that Nicole and I started during my internship phase of the study abroad program. We are going to do a more in-depth look at the causes of cerebral palsy in her patients at the Tena hospital, and we’re planning on comparing our research to data about cerebral palsy’s causes in the US to see the differences. It should be really interesting research, because in the US cerebral palsy is mainly caused by premature birth, but here most of the really premature babies don’t survive. It appears that there are a lot more cases caused by asphyxia during delivery, infections of the mother during pregnancy, and seizures after birth. So, we’ll see how accurate those hypotheses turn out to be.
In my spare time I’ve been running, reading, and watching pirated DVDs. I’ve been more or less keeping up with Mom and Kristin’s training schedule for the ½ marathon. I ran 9 miles on Friday evening, which I think is further than I have ever ran before in one stretch! Maybe when the day of their ½ marathon comes along I’ll do the Tena version that evening on the airport landing strip.
Gaby was out of town this weekend, but tonight she is bringing my little host brother, Francisco, back from visiting his grandparents. I’m really excited to see him – he adds a lot of liveliness to the house! Gaby just had to deal with an unexpected work layoff, but she’s found a new job in Tena with an NGO so I don’t have to worry about them moving on me.
I’ll be coming home on July 15th, which is seven weeks from today (not that I’m counting). I’m enjoying my time here very much, but I also look forward to seeing all of you. I hope you’re doing well – you should shoot me an e-mail to keep my updated on your lives!
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Wrapping it up...but not for long!
Hey everyone! I am in Tena right now, wrapping up my internship. But I´m not wrapping up the work with her for long, hopefully - I got the internship that I applied for through Grinnell, so I´ve got the funds to stay here until sometime between July 14th or the 18th (depending on plant ticket costs). But what I am doing with the internship is yet to be determined.
I've kept working with the physical therapist, Nicole, and I am loving physical therapy. It is actually something that I think I might be able to do with my future. I would like to spend the summer working with her, to continue the research on physical therapy, but I have to get my grant shifted first. See, I originally applied for the grant before I started with this work, so its funds are technically for a project in Quito, researching the effects of pesticide use in flower plantations on the workers and their children. Which still sounds interesting, but I would be sitting inside doing research on computers all day. Here, I could be working in the PT office, interviewing parents, living with my amazing host family and working with Nicole, who is a great boss. And hopefully putting together a paper good enough to get published. I have to ask Monty Roper, the head of the grant program, if I can switch. We´ll see what he says.
In other news, today I learned to eat crabs. This morning I went out with Gabi and Cecilia (the empleada) (Francisco is staying with his grandparents for a couple weeks, so he isn´t home) to the open air market (the feria) to buy live crabs, green plantains, onions, and some mandarin oranges, and two fruits we don´t have in the states, one called a chirimoya and the other called a zapote. Then we went back to the house and cleaned and prepped the crabs (I took photos), and Ceci whipped up a plantain and onion soup and then at the end threw in the crabs to boil. We each got a whole crab and a bunch of plantain pieces, and encebollada, which is onions and tomatoes chopped up, a plate of rice, and a freshly made glass of passionfruit juice. It was pretty awesome. Ceci and Gabi laughed at me because I ate with a serious expression on my face, I guess. And when they were teaching me to eat the head, I accidentally started to eat the wrong part and had to spit it out because it was so disgusting. By the end, our hands were covered in crab juice and there were ants eating at the little bits that ended up on the floor. It was a good time.
Tonight, salsa dancing. I might let you know how it goes.
Oh! Grandma - I got your Valentine´s day card in mid-March, but I was a vaga, which means lazy, and forgot to tell you I got it. Thanks so much (a month and a half late)!
I've kept working with the physical therapist, Nicole, and I am loving physical therapy. It is actually something that I think I might be able to do with my future. I would like to spend the summer working with her, to continue the research on physical therapy, but I have to get my grant shifted first. See, I originally applied for the grant before I started with this work, so its funds are technically for a project in Quito, researching the effects of pesticide use in flower plantations on the workers and their children. Which still sounds interesting, but I would be sitting inside doing research on computers all day. Here, I could be working in the PT office, interviewing parents, living with my amazing host family and working with Nicole, who is a great boss. And hopefully putting together a paper good enough to get published. I have to ask Monty Roper, the head of the grant program, if I can switch. We´ll see what he says.
In other news, today I learned to eat crabs. This morning I went out with Gabi and Cecilia (the empleada) (Francisco is staying with his grandparents for a couple weeks, so he isn´t home) to the open air market (the feria) to buy live crabs, green plantains, onions, and some mandarin oranges, and two fruits we don´t have in the states, one called a chirimoya and the other called a zapote. Then we went back to the house and cleaned and prepped the crabs (I took photos), and Ceci whipped up a plantain and onion soup and then at the end threw in the crabs to boil. We each got a whole crab and a bunch of plantain pieces, and encebollada, which is onions and tomatoes chopped up, a plate of rice, and a freshly made glass of passionfruit juice. It was pretty awesome. Ceci and Gabi laughed at me because I ate with a serious expression on my face, I guess. And when they were teaching me to eat the head, I accidentally started to eat the wrong part and had to spit it out because it was so disgusting. By the end, our hands were covered in crab juice and there were ants eating at the little bits that ended up on the floor. It was a good time.
Tonight, salsa dancing. I might let you know how it goes.
Oh! Grandma - I got your Valentine´s day card in mid-March, but I was a vaga, which means lazy, and forgot to tell you I got it. Thanks so much (a month and a half late)!
Monday, April 9, 2007
Still alive and dengue-free
I wrote this about 5 days ago, so it´s a little out of date. I´ll put more new things after it:
Wednesday
Hello everyone!
I had my first overnight shift in the hospital last night. I am dead tired and ready to sleep, but I thought I would update you a little bit first on how it went. Emily, Phoebe, and I chose last night’s guardia to attend because one of our favorite doctors, a resident named Dra. Violeta Muñoz, was on duty. Luckily, with Violeta came my favorite nurses, too, so it promised to be an interesting night. We got to the hospital at about 8 pm and stayed, in the end, until 8 am. At about 11 pm, the three of us got to see the first birth of the night (which was the first birth ever that I have witnessed in person). It came so quickly that there wasn’t enough time for the doctors to get there, much less for the mother (age 27, this was her 5th child) to be taken to the delivery room. The nurses had to catch the baby right then and there! Then the doctor arrived and whisked the baby away when she came in, and it was apart from its mother for another whole hour before the mama got to see her little girl. Shortly thereafter, a bus accident happened outside of Tena and about 8 patients got taken to our hospital. I was there when they started piling into the emergency room. One of the first patients to get there was a little girl who was 8 years old and had her forehead gashed open pretty deep. She required a couple of layers of stitches, but Violeta at least waited for the anesthesia to kick in before she started sewing. And, even better, she did a really neat job of it and I think the scar won’t be that noticeable blended with the girl’s eyebrow. As those patients proceeded to come in, I whipped out my blood pressure-taking skills (thanks for the lesson, Mom!) and helped out a little in the check-in process.
After that calmed down, I stuck around in Emergency, when a pregnant woman came in fully dilated, ready to give birth. Luck was on my side I guess, because I was the only student there and they only let one extra person into the delivery room other than the doctor and nurse. So I put on scrubs, face mask, surgical hat, everything (umm, is that normal? it seemed a little excessively sterile to me) and headed in. This birth was also quick, but the baby had its umbilical cord double-wrapped around its neck and it was slow to breathe. Phoebe and Emily were going to come in for the next birth, which happened pretty much right after, but they didn´t have enough scrubs, so I (luckily? I felt kinda bad.) got to stay in the delivery room and see the next birth, too. This was a 19 year old first-time mother, and its kinda sad that the thought going through my mind was "wow, this is only her first? she waited!". Her birth was slower, and was attended by a resident who hadn´t attended to a birth for 3 years. He was guessing a little bit, and wasn´t really talking to the patient much, so I tried talking her through some things, especially after when he was sewing up her episiotomy. As for that, the episiotomy didn´t seem entirely necessary - that baby was coming out pretty well - Mom, how customary is it for an episiotomy to be cut on a first baby "just in case"? Anyway, by the time all that was over, it was about 5:30 and I wanted a nap. So I took one, until 7, then pretty much wandered around until 8 because nothing was happening, and left. It was an amazing experience. I think I´ll be doing one every week. Okay, time to sleep!
So anyway, that was a week ago. Things have actually changed quite a bit for me in the hospital since then. Us gringas were "found" by a fellow gringa who runs a free physical therapy clinic on the fourth floor. I am really interested in her work and she wanted to do a research project on the link between how births go and the occurence of cerebral palsy and other physical and mental disabilities. She said that she sees forms of CP and haven´t been seen in the US in the last 10 years, and that is really interesting to me. So, I spent Thursday and today with her in her PT office. She is teaching me to work with the kids and we are working together on this project, which right now is becoming a big patient database with information on type of birth (vaginal or cesearian), birth weight, disability, birth complications, etc... with the hopes of running statistics on it later and presenting it to the health minister in Ecuador to change birth policies. I hope it works!! That actually makes staying in Ecuador for the summer even more enticing, because I could keep working with her in my free time, presenting our information.
That is another thing I don´t think I have really mentioned on my blog yet - I think I may be staying in Ecuador until mid-July, depending on if I get a grant from Grinnell or not. There is work that I´ve been offered in Quito to research the health effects of pesticide use in flower plantation workers. But, it is a volunteer research position, so me taking the work hinges on me getting a grant from Grinnell to do it. We´ll see what happens!
A change of subject: This last weekend, clearly, was Easter weekend. All of Gabi´s (my 27 year old host mom´s) family came into town on Thursday and Friday for the baptism of Gabi´s 3 year old son, Francisco. It was really neat having everyone there, though it was a little overwhelming too.
On Friday night, I went out with Emily and Phoebe to go to a bar and we ran into the physical therapist, and then we ran into a candlelight vigil procession. It stopped for each of the stations of the cross and was a pretty amazing sight. I definitely haven´t seen anything like it before. It was tons of people and candles and rosary saying. Wow.
On Saturday the family and I went to Archidona, the city next door, to see its zoo and then we went to a spot on a nearby river that looks like a jungle paradise to swim. Seriously - sandy beach, palm trees, clear water, a little cave, some rapids down below - it was amazing. Then we went to the baptism. The mass seriously went for 2 hours before the baptism happened! There were seven readings, each with a response, before the gospel, then a crazy long homily. Mom, was that how 3 hour long Easter services happened when you were little? Luckily, Gabi and family aren´t that religious so we snuck out after the baptism to go out to eat. The food was great and we had homemade coconut-vanilla cake. Yum!
The next day (yesterday...) all of the family left except Gabi´s sister Maria (24 years old) and Gabi, Maria and I spent most of the day watching movies. For a such a Catholic country, Easter was pretty chill. I´d say that the only major thing the Ecuadorians are missing out on is the trend to eat a lot of chocolate on Easter. Because really, what is Easter without a chocolate bunny?
So that´s my life until now. I am really hungry, so I´m going to go eat some lunch. ¡Adios!
Wednesday
Hello everyone!
I had my first overnight shift in the hospital last night. I am dead tired and ready to sleep, but I thought I would update you a little bit first on how it went. Emily, Phoebe, and I chose last night’s guardia to attend because one of our favorite doctors, a resident named Dra. Violeta Muñoz, was on duty. Luckily, with Violeta came my favorite nurses, too, so it promised to be an interesting night. We got to the hospital at about 8 pm and stayed, in the end, until 8 am. At about 11 pm, the three of us got to see the first birth of the night (which was the first birth ever that I have witnessed in person). It came so quickly that there wasn’t enough time for the doctors to get there, much less for the mother (age 27, this was her 5th child) to be taken to the delivery room. The nurses had to catch the baby right then and there! Then the doctor arrived and whisked the baby away when she came in, and it was apart from its mother for another whole hour before the mama got to see her little girl. Shortly thereafter, a bus accident happened outside of Tena and about 8 patients got taken to our hospital. I was there when they started piling into the emergency room. One of the first patients to get there was a little girl who was 8 years old and had her forehead gashed open pretty deep. She required a couple of layers of stitches, but Violeta at least waited for the anesthesia to kick in before she started sewing. And, even better, she did a really neat job of it and I think the scar won’t be that noticeable blended with the girl’s eyebrow. As those patients proceeded to come in, I whipped out my blood pressure-taking skills (thanks for the lesson, Mom!) and helped out a little in the check-in process.
After that calmed down, I stuck around in Emergency, when a pregnant woman came in fully dilated, ready to give birth. Luck was on my side I guess, because I was the only student there and they only let one extra person into the delivery room other than the doctor and nurse. So I put on scrubs, face mask, surgical hat, everything (umm, is that normal? it seemed a little excessively sterile to me) and headed in. This birth was also quick, but the baby had its umbilical cord double-wrapped around its neck and it was slow to breathe. Phoebe and Emily were going to come in for the next birth, which happened pretty much right after, but they didn´t have enough scrubs, so I (luckily? I felt kinda bad.) got to stay in the delivery room and see the next birth, too. This was a 19 year old first-time mother, and its kinda sad that the thought going through my mind was "wow, this is only her first? she waited!". Her birth was slower, and was attended by a resident who hadn´t attended to a birth for 3 years. He was guessing a little bit, and wasn´t really talking to the patient much, so I tried talking her through some things, especially after when he was sewing up her episiotomy. As for that, the episiotomy didn´t seem entirely necessary - that baby was coming out pretty well - Mom, how customary is it for an episiotomy to be cut on a first baby "just in case"? Anyway, by the time all that was over, it was about 5:30 and I wanted a nap. So I took one, until 7, then pretty much wandered around until 8 because nothing was happening, and left. It was an amazing experience. I think I´ll be doing one every week. Okay, time to sleep!
So anyway, that was a week ago. Things have actually changed quite a bit for me in the hospital since then. Us gringas were "found" by a fellow gringa who runs a free physical therapy clinic on the fourth floor. I am really interested in her work and she wanted to do a research project on the link between how births go and the occurence of cerebral palsy and other physical and mental disabilities. She said that she sees forms of CP and haven´t been seen in the US in the last 10 years, and that is really interesting to me. So, I spent Thursday and today with her in her PT office. She is teaching me to work with the kids and we are working together on this project, which right now is becoming a big patient database with information on type of birth (vaginal or cesearian), birth weight, disability, birth complications, etc... with the hopes of running statistics on it later and presenting it to the health minister in Ecuador to change birth policies. I hope it works!! That actually makes staying in Ecuador for the summer even more enticing, because I could keep working with her in my free time, presenting our information.
That is another thing I don´t think I have really mentioned on my blog yet - I think I may be staying in Ecuador until mid-July, depending on if I get a grant from Grinnell or not. There is work that I´ve been offered in Quito to research the health effects of pesticide use in flower plantation workers. But, it is a volunteer research position, so me taking the work hinges on me getting a grant from Grinnell to do it. We´ll see what happens!
A change of subject: This last weekend, clearly, was Easter weekend. All of Gabi´s (my 27 year old host mom´s) family came into town on Thursday and Friday for the baptism of Gabi´s 3 year old son, Francisco. It was really neat having everyone there, though it was a little overwhelming too.
On Friday night, I went out with Emily and Phoebe to go to a bar and we ran into the physical therapist, and then we ran into a candlelight vigil procession. It stopped for each of the stations of the cross and was a pretty amazing sight. I definitely haven´t seen anything like it before. It was tons of people and candles and rosary saying. Wow.
On Saturday the family and I went to Archidona, the city next door, to see its zoo and then we went to a spot on a nearby river that looks like a jungle paradise to swim. Seriously - sandy beach, palm trees, clear water, a little cave, some rapids down below - it was amazing. Then we went to the baptism. The mass seriously went for 2 hours before the baptism happened! There were seven readings, each with a response, before the gospel, then a crazy long homily. Mom, was that how 3 hour long Easter services happened when you were little? Luckily, Gabi and family aren´t that religious so we snuck out after the baptism to go out to eat. The food was great and we had homemade coconut-vanilla cake. Yum!
The next day (yesterday...) all of the family left except Gabi´s sister Maria (24 years old) and Gabi, Maria and I spent most of the day watching movies. For a such a Catholic country, Easter was pretty chill. I´d say that the only major thing the Ecuadorians are missing out on is the trend to eat a lot of chocolate on Easter. Because really, what is Easter without a chocolate bunny?
So that´s my life until now. I am really hungry, so I´m going to go eat some lunch. ¡Adios!
Monday, April 2, 2007
I´m in Tena, safe and sound
Oops... sorry for not writing for so long. As you can see, I´m in my internship phase right now, in Tena. It is in the tropics, so it´s about 80 degrees outside, though luckily it isn´t raining right now. For those of you who don´t know, my internship is at the Hospital José Maria Velasco Ibarra, a public hospital. I originally though I´d spend most of my time in obstetrics/gynecology, but as it turns out there isn´t a whole lot of action there during the day. So instead, two other students (Emily and Phoebe) and I wander around the hospital looking for interesting things to do. We go on rounds in pediatrics in the morning and generally end up in emergency for most of the day after that. The hospital is pretty different from anything I´ve seen before, and so are the illnesses. There´s a guy in the internal medicine unit in an isolated room who got a parasite that eats away at the cartilage in his face and causes severe enlargement of his nose and lips. His face is huge, and the skin from his now-mostly-flat nose takes up about half of his face. I don´t think this is anything I´ll ever see again in my life. Hope I don´t catch it :) Parasites are also incredibly common here. The water isn´t potable and the rivers all have parasites in them, so every day I see at least five parents come into the emergency room with kids suffering from parasites (or the parents have them themselves).
One of the most startling things to me is how young women start having babies. One 23-year-old woman in the emergency room today was on her sixth pregnancy. I´m not sure if it is lucky or not, but two of them have ended in miscarriage. It seems like every 20-year-old woman that walks through the emergency room door is pregnant with at least her second child. I cannot imagine how that would be.
I´ve decided that there are a lot of doctors in the hospital who I would not want to be seen by here. Some are really great - they care about their patients, they listen well, they treat them like they are excited to see them and are just fantastic. But, there is a group of about four young doctors from the coast, on residencies here for about 4 or 5 months, that I would never want to be my doctor. Especially if I was indigenous. They treat their patients (especially the indigenous) like they are stupid, like they don´t want to spend the time of day on them, and they don´t care if they cause their patients pain or invade their privacy. There was a woman in the ER today with a prolapsed uterus (or something like that) - the same one who is on her sixth pregnancy - and the doctor was asking her questions but not taking the time to listen to her answers, then told the woman (8 months pregnant, walked an hour to get to the hospital, has 3 kids at home) that her emergency really wasn´t and told her to come back tomorrow to see a gynecologist. Ridiculous. With a different pregnant and very embarassed patient, legs up in stirrups, the doctors in the room didn´t object at all to nurses walking in and out during the exam. And on Friday there was a little girl, 3 years old, whose brother had almost cut off her finger with a knife while chopping pieces of sugarcane. She was also indigenous. They had to sew back up the finger, and the same doctor as the one treating the pregnant woman washed the wound very brusquely, making the girl scream, and then without any warning gave her shots of anesthetic. But then, she didn´t wait for the anesthetic to kick in before she started sewing, so with every stitch the girl would writhe so badly, I could barely hold down her legs. Her mom was crying too, because she knew her poor little girl was in so much pain. I wanted to vomit from the sight.
Anyway, as if all of this wasn´t interesting enough, tomorrow I am coming in at 8 to watch some surgeries - I think a skin graft on a burn victim and maybe a C-section - and then I´m going home to sleep some because I´m coming back at 8 pm to stay for the night in the hospital so I can see some emergency surgery, some births, things like that. I´m pretty psyched about it. And, I will be following one of the doctors who I actually like very much, so I know that I won´t be bothered by the way she practices medicine. I´ll try to keep you guys updated as to how this internship turns out and everything.
¡Ciao!
One of the most startling things to me is how young women start having babies. One 23-year-old woman in the emergency room today was on her sixth pregnancy. I´m not sure if it is lucky or not, but two of them have ended in miscarriage. It seems like every 20-year-old woman that walks through the emergency room door is pregnant with at least her second child. I cannot imagine how that would be.
I´ve decided that there are a lot of doctors in the hospital who I would not want to be seen by here. Some are really great - they care about their patients, they listen well, they treat them like they are excited to see them and are just fantastic. But, there is a group of about four young doctors from the coast, on residencies here for about 4 or 5 months, that I would never want to be my doctor. Especially if I was indigenous. They treat their patients (especially the indigenous) like they are stupid, like they don´t want to spend the time of day on them, and they don´t care if they cause their patients pain or invade their privacy. There was a woman in the ER today with a prolapsed uterus (or something like that) - the same one who is on her sixth pregnancy - and the doctor was asking her questions but not taking the time to listen to her answers, then told the woman (8 months pregnant, walked an hour to get to the hospital, has 3 kids at home) that her emergency really wasn´t and told her to come back tomorrow to see a gynecologist. Ridiculous. With a different pregnant and very embarassed patient, legs up in stirrups, the doctors in the room didn´t object at all to nurses walking in and out during the exam. And on Friday there was a little girl, 3 years old, whose brother had almost cut off her finger with a knife while chopping pieces of sugarcane. She was also indigenous. They had to sew back up the finger, and the same doctor as the one treating the pregnant woman washed the wound very brusquely, making the girl scream, and then without any warning gave her shots of anesthetic. But then, she didn´t wait for the anesthetic to kick in before she started sewing, so with every stitch the girl would writhe so badly, I could barely hold down her legs. Her mom was crying too, because she knew her poor little girl was in so much pain. I wanted to vomit from the sight.
Anyway, as if all of this wasn´t interesting enough, tomorrow I am coming in at 8 to watch some surgeries - I think a skin graft on a burn victim and maybe a C-section - and then I´m going home to sleep some because I´m coming back at 8 pm to stay for the night in the hospital so I can see some emergency surgery, some births, things like that. I´m pretty psyched about it. And, I will be following one of the doctors who I actually like very much, so I know that I won´t be bothered by the way she practices medicine. I´ll try to keep you guys updated as to how this internship turns out and everything.
¡Ciao!
Monday, March 5, 2007
The Magic Roundabout
This weekend, Nora Skelly, Becka, Grace, and three other girls from our trip (Emily, Carla and Christina) and I went to a little hostal called The Magic Roundabout in a cloud forest in Las Palmas, about 3 and a half hours from Quito.
The couple who runs the hostal, Meg and Ali, are British expatriates. Ali decided that he was sick of England, so he and a friend packed up and moved to Ecuador because the living is cheap (though a month after moving Ecuador dollarized, so that isn´t as true now). They bought a parcel of land in the cloud forest and let it be, and built the hostal. A few years later, Meg wrote to Ali and asked if she could come and work for awhile. She and Ali fell in love, got married, and now Meg is 7 months pregnant with their first kid. Oh, and they are huge hippies - Meg is having a water birth, both have dreadlocks and Meg has an organic garden where she grows tomatoes, 7 kinds of lettuce (Which made the best salad I´ve eaten since my summer working with the CSA), sweet corn, peas, some other fruits, herbs, etc. They started growing tobacco plants for the purpose of making botique tobacco products (and because tobacco plants are good organic pesticides), but then Meg got pregnant so they ditched the tobacco products idea.
The food was organic and amazing (for the first time since arriving in Ecuador I felt like eating was a healthful activity) and there were hammocs (hamacas en español) where we sat and read that overlooked the forest and road, and I took a couple of hikes to see waterfalls on the property. We didn´t realize it before starting our first hike, but we may have risked life and limb to see these waterfalls. There were some pretty steep dropoffs on one side, and a couple of the hills we scrambled up required ropes for holding onto. And we had to wade up a river (they had us wear Wellies). Oh, and did I mention that it was raining? Still, the first hike was really nice.
Sunday, I went for one more to see the "big waterfall". Grace wanted to come but she slipped and bruised her hip the night before, and Becka tried to come but her asthma got to her, so it was just me, Ali, his two sweet dogs (Guinness and Winston) and a machete hiking up this really steep, muddy, jungle mountain. I fell a few times (and got a bruise on my knee from a boulder in the river), but came out alive. I´m not as sure if that waterfall was worth it, but I know that I would have regretted it if I didn´t go to see it. And when there isn´t much else to do that´s as good a reason as any, right?
We were sad to go that afternoon, but it was enough time to relax, rejuvenate a little, and adventure enough to feel like we had taken a worthwhile trip.
Oh! Mom and Dad - they had a poster up for the Secret Garden hostal in Quito Antiguo and said it was a pretty nice place.
The couple who runs the hostal, Meg and Ali, are British expatriates. Ali decided that he was sick of England, so he and a friend packed up and moved to Ecuador because the living is cheap (though a month after moving Ecuador dollarized, so that isn´t as true now). They bought a parcel of land in the cloud forest and let it be, and built the hostal. A few years later, Meg wrote to Ali and asked if she could come and work for awhile. She and Ali fell in love, got married, and now Meg is 7 months pregnant with their first kid. Oh, and they are huge hippies - Meg is having a water birth, both have dreadlocks and Meg has an organic garden where she grows tomatoes, 7 kinds of lettuce (Which made the best salad I´ve eaten since my summer working with the CSA), sweet corn, peas, some other fruits, herbs, etc. They started growing tobacco plants for the purpose of making botique tobacco products (and because tobacco plants are good organic pesticides), but then Meg got pregnant so they ditched the tobacco products idea.
The food was organic and amazing (for the first time since arriving in Ecuador I felt like eating was a healthful activity) and there were hammocs (hamacas en español) where we sat and read that overlooked the forest and road, and I took a couple of hikes to see waterfalls on the property. We didn´t realize it before starting our first hike, but we may have risked life and limb to see these waterfalls. There were some pretty steep dropoffs on one side, and a couple of the hills we scrambled up required ropes for holding onto. And we had to wade up a river (they had us wear Wellies). Oh, and did I mention that it was raining? Still, the first hike was really nice.
Sunday, I went for one more to see the "big waterfall". Grace wanted to come but she slipped and bruised her hip the night before, and Becka tried to come but her asthma got to her, so it was just me, Ali, his two sweet dogs (Guinness and Winston) and a machete hiking up this really steep, muddy, jungle mountain. I fell a few times (and got a bruise on my knee from a boulder in the river), but came out alive. I´m not as sure if that waterfall was worth it, but I know that I would have regretted it if I didn´t go to see it. And when there isn´t much else to do that´s as good a reason as any, right?
We were sad to go that afternoon, but it was enough time to relax, rejuvenate a little, and adventure enough to feel like we had taken a worthwhile trip.
Oh! Mom and Dad - they had a poster up for the Secret Garden hostal in Quito Antiguo and said it was a pretty nice place.
Friday, March 2, 2007
El Lavabo/My most embarassing 30 minutes ever
Story time!
Setting: My bathroom, Thursday, 1:30 am
Once upon a time, there was a club called Bundalow 6. On Wednesday night, this club has no cover and free drinks for women between 7 and 10 pm. Wednesday night is universally, among CIMAS girls, the night to go out to this club, have a few drinks, and dance. Generally, we dance until about 12:30 or 1 am and then go home. This last Wednesday night we went to Bungalow 6, left at 12:45, and got home around 1 am. I proceeded to get ready for bed and noticed that my feet were a little dirty from wearing sandals. And I couldn´t wash them in my shower because it only functions as a shower, not as a bath. So, I decided to wash them in the sink. Because I didn´t want to get my sheets dirty, of course. As I was washing off my feet (and not pressing very hard on the sink) all of a sudden the sink fell off of the wall. You read that right. Just for emphasis, I´ll repeat myself. The sink fell OFF THE WALL. But it was still attached to the sink pipes, so I just stood there and turned off the water and held the sink while propping it up with my knee. Of course, the water was still on and so started spraying into the floor. At which point I came out of shock just enough to call for my host brother - "!Fabian, ven aquí, por favor!" - and he came. His response was somewhere along the lines of "what did you do?!" and he got his mom, Cecilia. So, Cecilia came in, looked at the pipes spraying water, and said essentially "I don´t know what to do, I´m going to go get Oswaldo." So in comes my 60 year old host dad, wearing pajama pants and slippers and bearing an enormous wrench. He takes a look at the wet floor and says "just a minute, I´m going to go change and turn off the water." He went to do that, and came back in bare feet and boxers. And I held up the sink so it wouldn´t crash onto his head and kill him while he proceeded to disassemble the piping and detach the sink from the wall. Then I gently put it in the bathtub, where it spent the night. Somewhere along the way, I said something like "Ridiculous things always happen to me!" and my dad starting laughing - at me, at the situation, I´m not sure. Probably a little of both. - and said "nope, this has certainly never happened before!" Meanwhile, Cecilia swept the water into the drain on my bathroom floor and got a little mad, asking me if I had put a lot of pressure on the sink. I guess I might be a little mad too, being woken up at 1:30 in the morning by my son because my host daughter broke my sink. Overall, both of my host parents took it all very well. It made me appreciate my host dad a lot, both because he knows how to fix things like sinks that have fallen off of walls and because he kept laughing and doesn´t get mad when things go wrong. And I appreciated Cecilia because she didn´t give me a hard time about it the next day.
In the end, I think that the moral of this story is that one should not attemt to wash their feet in a sink that is attached to the wall.
Setting: My bathroom, Thursday, 1:30 am
Once upon a time, there was a club called Bundalow 6. On Wednesday night, this club has no cover and free drinks for women between 7 and 10 pm. Wednesday night is universally, among CIMAS girls, the night to go out to this club, have a few drinks, and dance. Generally, we dance until about 12:30 or 1 am and then go home. This last Wednesday night we went to Bungalow 6, left at 12:45, and got home around 1 am. I proceeded to get ready for bed and noticed that my feet were a little dirty from wearing sandals. And I couldn´t wash them in my shower because it only functions as a shower, not as a bath. So, I decided to wash them in the sink. Because I didn´t want to get my sheets dirty, of course. As I was washing off my feet (and not pressing very hard on the sink) all of a sudden the sink fell off of the wall. You read that right. Just for emphasis, I´ll repeat myself. The sink fell OFF THE WALL. But it was still attached to the sink pipes, so I just stood there and turned off the water and held the sink while propping it up with my knee. Of course, the water was still on and so started spraying into the floor. At which point I came out of shock just enough to call for my host brother - "!Fabian, ven aquí, por favor!" - and he came. His response was somewhere along the lines of "what did you do?!" and he got his mom, Cecilia. So, Cecilia came in, looked at the pipes spraying water, and said essentially "I don´t know what to do, I´m going to go get Oswaldo." So in comes my 60 year old host dad, wearing pajama pants and slippers and bearing an enormous wrench. He takes a look at the wet floor and says "just a minute, I´m going to go change and turn off the water." He went to do that, and came back in bare feet and boxers. And I held up the sink so it wouldn´t crash onto his head and kill him while he proceeded to disassemble the piping and detach the sink from the wall. Then I gently put it in the bathtub, where it spent the night. Somewhere along the way, I said something like "Ridiculous things always happen to me!" and my dad starting laughing - at me, at the situation, I´m not sure. Probably a little of both. - and said "nope, this has certainly never happened before!" Meanwhile, Cecilia swept the water into the drain on my bathroom floor and got a little mad, asking me if I had put a lot of pressure on the sink. I guess I might be a little mad too, being woken up at 1:30 in the morning by my son because my host daughter broke my sink. Overall, both of my host parents took it all very well. It made me appreciate my host dad a lot, both because he knows how to fix things like sinks that have fallen off of walls and because he kept laughing and doesn´t get mad when things go wrong. And I appreciated Cecilia because she didn´t give me a hard time about it the next day.
In the end, I think that the moral of this story is that one should not attemt to wash their feet in a sink that is attached to the wall.
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