This past week we had a huge team from all over the world to do a medical campaign in Cusco for a few days and then in outlying areas for another couple of days,. It has been a bit of a change from normal daily life here.
Pretty much every day was super busy with lots and lots of patients. I helped out with triage most of the days. One of the days I was curious about how long patients were waiting to be seen, so I asked one of the patients how long they had been waiting and she told me that she had arrived at 530 a.m. and she ended up coming through triage at 10 a.m. as the 30th patient in line. Yikes! We were able to see lots of patients, but it just wasn’t possible to see everyone.
It’s been a long couple of days for my brain. I’ve forgotten how much of a challenge it can be to continually switch between Spanish and English all day long as I was talking with the patients when they came and was then writing it all down in English since most of the doctors were from the States. I had to laugh at myself when I wrote uterectomy on a patient’s history and couldn’t figure out why it just didn’t look right. Glad I came up with hysterectomy a minute later. But…….I did survive.
It was a bit of a crazy week, but I’m glad I could be involved in the fun.
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one of the little villages where we had clinic for a day |
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patients waiting..... |
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triage |
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one of the many cute kids we saw at the mobile clinic |