Here comes my long-delayed blog. I haven't been as good at keeping things updated as I hoped to. Somehow time just seems to slip away and whatever I wanted to say seems kinda outdated by the time I get around to actually writing it down.
Last week we went up to Chiang Mai (about a 7 hour drive or so from our house). We've been having mechanical difficulties with our vehicles which has really been creating some difficulties with the medical work so we had to go up and try to fix things. At the same time they were holding a media seminar up there (something I've always wanted to do) that I was able to attend. I discovered that as much as I like computers and cameras, I don't like staring at them all day.:) It was great training though!
Monday I came down by minibus together with a friend ahead of my family. Then by surprise a couple of the guys came and picked us up on motorbikes in Mae Sariang. Now that's a fun road to ride!:) It's got it all - about 3 hours of good road, bad road, and worse road, together with pincurves and many a hill.:)
So here I am back on the border. I've been keeping busy doing patient care again. Sometimes it's quite slow, but other times you're doing just to find time to brush your teeth in the morning. We've got so many pediatric patients. Just a guess, but I think I could say that probably 80+% of them are either babies or small kids. Yesterday I a took 4-month-old into the hospital that was having pretty severe breathing difficulty. He ended up having bacterial pneumonia. Today we took in 2 more. A one and two year old. One of them was just recovering from measles and really didn't look good. That's the first time I've seen skin "tenting" in real life. She was acting very lethargic and I considered her to be an urgent patient. We have to stick with the patient in the hospital to make sure that the doctor actually carefully evaluates the patient. Often they will just look at one thing and make their diagnoses just because they're so busy, rather than taking all the symptoms into consideration. For example, almost everyone that comes in complaining of stomach pain comes out diagnosed with gastritis. Just as a rather hilarious anecedote, my mom went in because she was having some trouble with her lungs and thought she might have pneumonia and the doctor diagnosed her with having an allergy to the cold. She thought better of informing him that she came from Montana.:) Anyways... On this one the doctor wouldn't believe that the patient was dehydrated or had measle complications. He diagnosed her with having just a common cold. So tomorrow we'll be taking them back to a different hospital.
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2 comments:
Good to hear from you again, Maria! The hospital situation sounds similar to where we were. The locals would often come to our clinic instead of the hospital because the knew they would get better care. Maybe as you get more experience you will need to do fewer hospital runs! Miss you~ Lisa
You too, Lisa! Yeah, it would certainly be wonderful to not need to go to the hospital as often. We actually don't take the majority of our patients there. Most of them we try to care for ourselves. But we don't always have the supplies needed or experience. I'm really thankful to be able to work with an experienced ER nurse part of the time though.:)
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