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!