Haiti day 5

Today was a crazy day. I think I only saw about 6 patients all day who were actually assigned to me. Most of the patients I saw had athletes foot on smalll wounds from bacteria. I did see a pretty nasty head wound( unknown origin) and moisture associated dermatitis. I saw a few returnee patients ( all wounds) and a smattering of ortho patients. Most of the ortho patients o saw had back and neck pain. I did a lot of needling and manipulations as well as massage and cupping. All of the patients we see work really hard day to day to make a living/ survive. They have to get into crazy positions and carry insane amount of weight. It is no wonder they are so sore!
I also screened some general medical patients for basic issues to make it more efficient for the nurses to give out meds. I have become rather proficient in testing pee for UTIs as well as taking blood sugars. I am also getting really good at cranial nerve testing and vision screens. I learn so much here!!!
After work we hung out , sorted drugs, ate dinner and then headed off to a salsa club. OMG!!!!! So fun. There were a few really good dancers there. I did a bolero solo with one of them. I watched the video and I did not look like me dancing! There were minimal ballet arms and I actually looked like I knew what I was doing!The salsa dancing is super fun, but my favorite part is the tap tap ride. At home we always wear seat belts and only put as many people in the car as can fit safetly. Well that does not happen here at all. There were wel over 25 people sitting and standing in the back of the truck. The people in the town all look at us like we are " crazy white people" all yelling every time we go over a bump. Personal space is not a thing here and we were all packed in like sardines. I bet if Haitians had been in the tap tap, they would have had far more people efficiently packed in. Luckily for us our driver was nice and went slow.
The town itself comes alive at night. All the people are out in the streets in in the small shops lining the dirt street. Driving rules here seem Willy nilly, but I have survived several tap tap rides unscathed.😜



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 3

Image
First day of clinic! What a day. Controlled chaos with over 130 patients seen by 30 PTs in a 6-7 hour period. To give you a better picture of the clinic I have attached a picture at the bottom of it before the patients came in. It is about 800 square feet with 14 beds. There are 30 therapists, 30 interpreters  and more than 30 patients and heir family members milling around the clinic at any given time.... all these people while we are doing gait training, family training for transfers , bracing trials and orthopedic interventions. That is what I mean by controlled chaos. Although I am constantly bumping into people and saying" excuse me" I would not have it any other way. If I have a moment of down time I look to the therapist next to me and 100 percent of the time they are performing an intervention I have not seen before. I look two feet beyond that therapist and see another therapist teaching a PT how to do walk using techniques I had read about but never seen. All the bo
Read more

Weekend days 7 and 8

Image
This weekend was a nice relaxing weekend. After the week 1 crew left the people who were staying two weeks headed over to Tortuga for some relaxing weekend fun. We took a speed boat over ( super fast!) and then zipped up to the top of the mountains in a tap tap. We unpacked all our stuff and then went on a hike. The hike was really cool. We walked down to some caves and saw all kinds of cool formations and then we walked around the island. It was nice and toasty while we were walking and it felt great to get in real exercise ! I then proceeded to nap for a few hours. After we all napped we hung out on the porch for a few hours and ate dinner . One of the girls brought a hammock so I hung out in that for a bit.  Sunday morning we headed back down the island, took a boat back to the main island , picked up the new crew and then headed back to Tortuga ( the other side) for some fun in the sun at the beach! The new crew seems great. There are a lot of people who like wound care and there a
Read more

Day 13

Image
Teaching day!!!!! I got to go into town and teach a group of 1st and 2nd year nursing students about wounds. It was a very interesting experience. The school was two rooms with no electricity. The kids did their labs outside. The desks were like the school desks we sat in a kids back in elementary school. I was having flashbacks to the stories my dad told me as a kid about his school days. The kids were engaged in the lecture and asked great questions. It was fun watching them during the lab part. I was teaching them how to debride and dress a wound. As I was talking to the kids I found one of them Jd recently burned his leg on a motorcycle and had crushed up amoxicillin and put it in his burn. Needless to say , I told him to come back to the clinic with me so I could clean the wound and dress it . After teaching I cam back to the clinic and treated wounds for the rest of the day with one or two ortho patients thrown in there. I did get to needle a patient independently which was fun.
Read more