By Britt:
First of all, I apologize that I haven't been blogging much lately. I haven't had a ton of new medical cases; I am definitely at an all-time low. But it was welcomed since I had finals all last week. I am officially done with my first semester of college classes! I just wanted to post a few of the things that I've seen recently. Nothing too gory, or at least I don't think so. Thank you to everyone who has been praying for us and for all of the sweet Christmas emails. It was a weird Christmas, but a good one none-the-less. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and got to spend time with your families and friends.
Okay, so this happened when a fifteen year old boy was peeling a coconut; missed the coconut and hit his finger with the machete. It could have been a lot worse, that's for sure. The photo on the left is the before. I did a digital block to numb up the thumb so that I was able to take a better look at it w/o causing him pain. The nail was barely attached, so I just went with where it was split and removed it. As I suspected, there was a little hole where the bone was exposed, so I did three stitches to close it up. The photo to the below right is what it looked like after I took the nail off, but before the stitches. His family lives up in the mountains so he went up there to spend his Christmas vacation with them. I gave him all the stuff to change the bandages and he'll come find me when he comes back to start school again.
This next patient is similar to many of my previous patients, but with a not-so-cool twist. She, like others, came with a cut that was caused by a motorcycle accident. The not-so-cool detail is that she is the third person to be victimized by this one particular motorcycle driver and his moto. I am very tempted to find out who it is and take away his motorcycle. (Not like I could actually do that, but in a perfect world, he would not be able to drive anymore)
This lady lives in the mountains too, so she will change her own bandages and come see me to get the stitches removed in two weeks. If you care to see the other cuts this guy's bad driving/malfunctioning moto have caused; here is the first victim and the second victim .
I haven't been feeling well the last couple of days. Yesterday I slept for most of the afternoon. My mom came in to check on me and see how I was doing because I had a new stitches patient here. I don't even remember her coming in, but obviously I wasn't doing well enough to get up and check out the new cut. I am really bummed about it; not necessarily that I missed the chance for more practice, just more that the out-come is not as good as I'd like it to be. He got cut above his eye when he fell off of a bike yesterday.
He went to the lady near St. Aird who knows how to do stitches. She 'knows how' but she is kind of a ... sloppy worker. She put in four large stitches where about eight smaller ones were necessary. And she didn't even sew up the lower cut, as you can see below. His eye is swollen shut and I rolled out a lot of fluid from above (almost like a pocket of it forming on his forehead). I'm worried about it, it seems to be one that will be very susceptible to numerous different issues. And it could have been done much better. We will just take it for what it is and in our semper-gumby fashion ... in Haiti it would be called degaje. ('make it work')
I have three more weeks off of school before second semester starts, during that time our church and a girlfriend from my school are coming down so it should be a fun few weeks.
