June 2nd, Monday.
We went to HOH today! Manuel (our trufi driver), picked us up at like 8:30 ad we got to the hospital around 9. It's pretty small and there weren't too many patients during the morning, but I went with Kelli and Christina to shadow an internal medicine doc in an exam room. The first patient he saw was a 75 y.o. Quechua man who had a terrible cough, was not eating and could not swallow, could not pee, and was very weak. This was a cool experience for me because I understood what was going on since many of the things he did, we have learned about in nursing classes. They suspected he had had an embolism in his brain, had aspirated some phlegm, and had a pleural effusion, so they were going to do an xray (CXR), urinalysis, and draw some blood. The family had to translate for him from Spanish to Quechua, and he was hard of hearing which made the equation even more difficult.
Another lady came in who said she had a little "bolito"that pouched out of her stomach and was causing her some discomfort. The doc suspected a hernia, but the epigastric area he thought it was in was not the area that was hurting her. She had also traveled to Italy recently and fell in the shower, so they thought that she had had a DVT (maybe that had become dislodged?), and prescribed her an expectorant, told her to check her BP at home for 5 days (her BP at the time was 154/84) to see if she needed to be put on a blood pressure med, told her to make sure to keep taking her ASA consistently, and referred her to a general surgeon to take a look at her abdomen. We were also able to talk a lot with Marlington, one of the brazilian med interns, and met a girl in nursing school at the U down the road named Wanita from Guyana. I'm hoping we will have more opportunities to talk with and witness to the interns/students here.
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