Hump Day

Wednesday 07/14/2010

My part of the team is to be the Chaplain. During the day I spend most of my time praying with people that are getting ready for surgery. It is amazing to me how open they are to having a stranger sit down and pray over them. I ask them in Spanish if I can pray for them and I always get a warm “Si”. As I begin to pray they often begin to pray also and in many cases they pray more fervently than I do.

The stoves teams completed the concrete floors and white washing walls today and began to set up the stoves. The next two days will be occupied with that.

Wednesday seems to be the hard day in the trip at least as far as the medical end of things is concerned. All day we hear…hump day…and it seems that there are many difficulties to be overcome including fatigue. Late in the afternoon the medical team was trying to decide how many more patients to operate on because the recovery area was filling up. Some adjustments were made and the operating continued late into the night with some going to bed at 1 a.m.

The general surgeons had a 70 year old woman on whom they did a colon resection. Normally the surgeons would use staples to put the ends together but because of a lack of equipment, they had to do it the old fashion way and suture the ends together.

A lady who had surgery on Tuesday developed a hemoglobin of 4 …hard to believe so it was repeated to be a 5 showing she was anemic. They took her back into surgery thinking she had a bleed but there was not any…apparently she had a reaction the blood transfusion that she had. She had chronic bleeding and 4-5 births over the last four years.

I made one last sweep of the hospital at about 9 p.m. and found everybody in a buzz in one of the ORs. The doctors were removing a cyst the size of my fist from a man’s neck/shoulder. We could see it through the window and the nurse brought it out in a jar for us to see. It looked like a big orange peeled hard boiled egg…but as big as my fist…and very firm. Apparently the surgeons had taken out a much smaller cyst a year ago when we were here. They have sent it to pathology but the man has already gone home.