Clinic in La Molina
Clinic this morning was chaos. The Doctor was telling me to do a dressing change on a patient who had an abcess drained yesterday, while Manuel the Dentist shoved an injection of Diazepam and a stressed patient in my direction, and Karen yelled from the pharmacy area because she couldn't find any more Captopril. Jenni ran around with a wild look on her face, answering questions in triage, translating for her mother, directing and assessing the emergency patients. Small children screamed and wailed from behind the dental curtain, and I had two ladies sitting on the bench in the pharmacy with IV's to bring down their blood sugars, their bottles of fluid hanging from the rafters of our tiny pavilion. They watched the dripping nervously.
Yesterday we had a big box of useful supplies stolen from the back of the truck. All of our stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, tongue depressors, trash bags, pens, thermometers, gloves, paper, weight scales, scissors, and every last bottle of hand sanitizer are gone. We're managing with scissors pulled from our surgery set, and an extra blood pressure cuff that Corrie had left behind in the kindergarten where we're staying, but I must say I do miss the gloves and hand sanitizer.
In the late afternoon I passed out chocolate cookies to the dazed looking boys pulling teeth in the dental area, and to the Doctor who paced up and down the hall while waiting for the patients in triage.
Shelley and I encouraged each other as we passed out baggies of Albendazol and adult vitamins. We were sweating buckets and our scrubs were covered with stains of unknown origin, but still we love what we're doing, chaos and all.
Yesterday we had a big box of useful supplies stolen from the back of the truck. All of our stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, tongue depressors, trash bags, pens, thermometers, gloves, paper, weight scales, scissors, and every last bottle of hand sanitizer are gone. We're managing with scissors pulled from our surgery set, and an extra blood pressure cuff that Corrie had left behind in the kindergarten where we're staying, but I must say I do miss the gloves and hand sanitizer.
In the late afternoon I passed out chocolate cookies to the dazed looking boys pulling teeth in the dental area, and to the Doctor who paced up and down the hall while waiting for the patients in triage.
Shelley and I encouraged each other as we passed out baggies of Albendazol and adult vitamins. We were sweating buckets and our scrubs were covered with stains of unknown origin, but still we love what we're doing, chaos and all.
posted by Ansley at 6:34 PM
3 Comments:
Someday I'll look forward to having you explain to me why you are using IV drips to treat hypertension in a clinic setting. Was there clearly evidence of a hypertensive crisis? Did you have no oral medication to use? Is there any follow up happening to see that you are effectively managing their hypertension after treating it initially? Sorry to be a wet blanket but somebody needs to be sure that you take a moment to back away from the immediate situation and take the long view.
Hi Ted,
You are right to be concerned that we'd give IVs to bring down blood pressures! I made a mistake when typing because it was late at night and I wasn't thinking. The IVs were for bringing down blood sugars, not blood pressures. Oops. I'll go back and edit that right now. We have no way of keeping insulin cold or carrying it with us, so our current best way of treating elevated blood sugars (these patients were each over 400), is to use IV drips and then oral meds and monitor the sugar levels for the next few days.
Hydrating someone to lower a blood sugar greater than 400 especially in the situation where you have no insulin makes perfect sense to me. Thanks for the explanation. I apologize for hasty judgment.
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