The past few days...

Welcome to the crazy life of Mindy Schreven. It has been many a day since I have tuned into my blog. After many days of organizing, pricing, and purchasing medicines, it was finally time for clinic to start. But first we had some fun. Last Sabbath afternoon after feasting on pasta salad with fresh veggies with a unique lemon-poppy seed-avacado dressing that I concocted, we piled, squished and crammed into the truck for a bumpy ride to a distant land with a small lake. The lake is uber warm except for a sliver of cold about 5.72 ft under (definitely not quite 6 ft under). The water was mucky brown, which is good because then you can’t see all the fish that bite. As long as you stay active though, no fish will bite. We splashed around in the lake for a good hour and a half. We swam and launched people and played some games with the local Peruvians. It was a great afternoon before the frenzy of packing up our entire pharmacy/medical clinic/dental clinic later that night. Our little Toyota truck was piled high with anything and everything we might possibly need for doing tasks such as pulling teeth to doing surgery to simply giving out Tylenol (we may have even squeezed a few cookies in some of the cracks too) In the end the stuff stuck up about 6 ft above the rim of the bed of the truck. Way over packed by American standards, but about normal for Peruvian standards. The next morning (Sunday) I got up soon after 5 , took a cold shower in the dark and hurriedly helped grab the last few things we needed before driving off to the clinic site. Thankfully we had delivered the bulk of the stuff the night before, leaving us half the bed of the truck to squeeze 9 people into. The only hard part is that we all had to sit in the bed of the truck, we couldn’t stand or else the police will pull us over. The cab of the truck was equally crammed with 8 people. With a lurch of the stick shift truck we were on our way to clinic driving into a brilliant jungle sunrise. About 45 minutes later we arrived at the clinic site in the outskirts of Pucallpa, gobbled up some cold oatmeal cooked the night before and thus began the first clinic. My first job was to assist in the pharmacy. Before too long prescriptions were pouring in from Dr. Matthews and Dr. Mike. Thus jump started my career in deciphering doctor’s handwriting. It is a tough job just as everyone says, especially when the prescription is written in Spanish. After deciphering the prescription I got to search for the named medicine, the write out he medicine instructions in Spanish, then explain the instructions to the patient. With limited Spanish this is a fun and exciting task, but it was a great learning experience. I was so busy all morning that I didn’t even look at my watch until about 2 pm and that was only because of an enormous tummy grumble. So I gulped some more water to hold me over until lunch. I had been so busy that I had barely had time to think about being. Throughout the remainder of the week we spent our time helping about 140 patients a day. We had the opportunity to help many people who were in great need of help. We tended to many kids that without immediate help would have died before morning. One little boy was especially sick, the hard thing was that he was too small to have any veins that we could put an IV in. After about 15 minutes of searching for a vein we finally found a large enough one in his foot. We then gave him the prescribed meds and got some good fluid in him. We kept him in the clinic for the next few hours monitoring him, and sent him home later in the afternoon since he was beginning to perk up. Besides giving out meds, taking blood pressures and giving shots to the slightly less lucky individuals I also got to work in triage. For the first few hours of doing triage I had a translator to help me interpret all the symptoms the patients were talking about. But then for the rest of the week I was on my own. This I would say was the toughest part of my week. My limited Spanish (especially in the medical field) made it a little bit hard to determine what the patients were saying. But before too long I found myself being able to communicate fairly decently with the patients. On the second day of clinic I had the opportunity to glove up and assist Dr. Mike in a biopsy on a possible melanoma. Yet again this was an amazing learning experience. I have learned more this week than I could have imagined, and yet in learning all this I am only realizing how much more I have to learn.
After the frenzy of clinic week we decided just to rest at Km 38 for Sabbath afternoon. But I could only sit still for so long, so I gatherd up a small army of two others and we grabbed machetes and headed off into the jungle in search of an adventure. After about 17,034 bug bites we finally had the grand pleasure of seeing 6 wild monkeys. They were small black ones with poofs at the end of their tails, but they were my first wild monkey sightings, which completely made my day.
Things have been pretty crazy here on our funny farm. Sadly our little kitty got attacked by the dogs and got his back leg broken. Fortunately he is a strong little creature and has now figured out how to hobble around on 3 legs whenever one of us is not carrying him around. A grand addition to our funny farm is a little brown monkey. We are till trying to teach him not to bite, but he is a grand little creature. A moment never passes when he is not chasing frogs or bugs or scrambling all over the hammock or the nearest person.
Chau for now!