First day at Hospitalito Atitlan

First of all, thank you all for reading, commenting and emailing :) Sitting about a million miles away I still feel loved (or at least liked)! I would like to report that my first day at the hospital was good. Anyway, there were no disasters and I count this as a win. This morning I couldn't sleep past 5:30 when the roosters seem to start their day, but this may be secondary to going to sleep around 9 last night.

After breakfast of rice in milk with cinnamon (there must be some name for this) and coffee I rode my bike to the hospital. This was a bit of an adventure as the streets are mostly cobblestone and extremely riddled with pot holes. Also I go down a relatively steep hill to get to the hospital. (Riding home was even more of an adventure as Tuk-Tuks whiz by, think speeding bullet on wheels driven by a 12 year old, and the street was wet from the huge rain storm that hit us this afternoon.) Anyway, I got to the hospital early and no one else had yet arrived (the dr. on call from the night before was there). Hospital volunteers trickled in between 7:30 and 8AM and clinic started around 8:30. There are only 3 rooms for clinic patients and I saw patients mostly in a group with another student or resident. I also spent some time with Dr. Chuc who is the main doctor at the clinic. I certainly did less during my time with Dr. Chuc, but it was quite interesting to see how he interacted with patients. I would say that over half of the patients only speek the native dialect (Tzutujil) and except for Dr. Chuc all of us needed to have an interpreter.

The hospital formulary is quite a bit more comprehensive than I had expected. However, we requested remarkably little blood work. In the hospital there is a technician who can do a basic CBC (no platelets), but almost everything else has to be sent to a larger town. Also, the patients don't seem to like to have the relatively painful and expensive experience of the blood draw. The clinic has a sliding scale, based on things like what kind of floor and roof the patients have at home. We saw several patients with high blood pressure, and some pre and post-partum visits. The clinic has a two hour break for lunch! Horray -- siesta time :) I don't quite have time to come home for lunch and I think I will go get something from a stand in the future. Today I lunched on luna bars, a green orange and several small bananas. I'm going to go downstairs for dinner in a few minutes and am crossing my fingers that there is no meat. For the record, yesterday I did eat chicken (I have been vegetarian for about a year) and beans (I am a bean-o-phobe). Who knows what I will eat tonight!