Day 16

Today I got a tour of the inside of the hospital. There is a men's room, a woman's room , and SCI room and a pediatric room all stationed off the ED. The rooms are large squares that have several cots where the patients stay. Right now no one has a private room, but they are building a new ED where they hope to have some private rooms. The rooms are loud and hot, but the patients are getting good free medical care , so that is all that really matters! They also get fed for free, which is novel for Haiti hospitals. Usually family needs to bring the patient food and medicine. Here they. Get both for free!
Today we popped by the men's unit to check out a kiddo who they though had guillian barre. Just like at home, it was unclear if he actually had it or not, but we evaluated him anyway. He was able to walk from the IP part of the hospital to our little gym. We gave him some exercises and are having him come back tomorrow to see how he is doing.
We saw the same patients  that we saw yesterday and two new ones. One of them had not been out of bed x 4 months because she had a flap surgery for s pressure injury . I had spoken to an MD earlier in the day and asked if it was OK for us to get her out of bed. He was cool with it so she sat up for the first time today. She was very scared and excited at the same time. Once she was up in the chair she had a HUGe smile in her face. We got her up around the time of the support group so she and her mom were able to go to that. 
We also saw another patient who has been in bedrest for 2 months and has 10 more months to go. He has Potts disease with is tuberculosis of the spine. He is getting better on the medication, but still needs to be on bedrest. I am not entirely sure why this is the case and my quick internet search last night did not help. If anyone knows please let me know!!!!
I also learned today that the people who have wounds are placed on bedrest until they heal. OY VEY!!! I was told to find a project to work on and I think this will be it. People with would can 100%do therapy, you just need to be creative about it. When I am at home I will come up with a protocol so all the patients can be getting therapy.
After clinic today we had an exercise class! Sophia ( the PT) ran it. It was fun to finally get some exercise in! I was a sweaty mess at the end, but my legs get good to move a bit! We had plans to go to a BBQ off campus, however it started to rain, so we hung out on campus instead. 

The SCI crew

Marshmallow the dog joined us for our exercise class

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 6

Image
Bon fait dropo!!!!! Happy flag day! Today is a national holiday in Haiti and people have work and school off. The clinic was just as busy as ever. We had a fun start to the day with the interpreters leading the patients waiting outside in a Haiti s national anthem. Immediately after we got down to business. I saw 6 people in the morning most of whom had ortho issues. I did my first solo cervicle manipulation and got a crack each time I did it!!!!! I also quickly saw another persons patient who needed stitches taken out... always good times. In the afternoon I saw a few people who had had strokes and several smaller wounds I have been following. The running theme of my day today was high blood pressure. I had a patient who had a blood pressure of 200/100 and a few at 180/100 eeek!!!! Luckily we are well stocked with BP medications . Educating people on food choices is one way to help control BP; however, The difficulty here is that people eat what they can get. If you advise them to lim
Read more