It's been an intense day. We got a bit of a late start, and we're all tired after three long days of seeing patients, and a lot of rain yesterday. We were driving to a new village, and Israel started telling us about it. It's really poor, he said, because they don't have any cash crops, just subsistence farming products-corn and beans. When Israel says a place is poor, it's POOR. Really, really, really POOR.
My job is writing down patient's names and chief complaints. We send them in by families, so often I figure out who is related to whom and how stable the families are based on the last names of the kids versus the mom who brings them.
Today I registered a seventeen year old girl who had a three year old child. Do the math.
But I also registered a DAD who had stood in the triage line and cared for his toddler daughter and son the entire day while his wife had their newborn baby. The most stable family I had seen for a long time.
A funny moment was writing down as a chief complaint for a few sixteen year old boys at the end "acne." That was the first time this week I had heard that as the chief complaint.
But one of their friends, also their age, was deaf-mute. He was the first deaf person I have ever encountered in Honduras. His friends spoke for him. He tried to talk, and it sounded speech-like in the intonation patterns, but they definitely weren't words. So his friends spoke for him. Heartbreaking. In this isolated community, he is even more isolated. It broke my heart to think of his future, especially trapped without any language except for his home signs.
Then we had to make a home visit to a house where there were two people who couldn't walk down to where the clinic was. It was an old man and his wife. They lived in a one-room mud shack with three beds, some chickens, and thirteen people. I stood there and translated for this poor old man who had colon cancer (probably), bad cataracts, extreme leg pain, and no teeth. His wife had such bad arthritis she couldn't even move her fingers. And arthritis pain pills for her are expensive, 23 lempira ($1.15) for two weeks' worth of 50mg of pain killers per day. As the medical interview went on and on and the kids were running around my heart broke more and more.
On days like today I have so many unanswered questions--why? why? What do I do with this? I know the answers people can give, but at the end of the day I had to put these people and this community into the hands of the God I trust, because all my answers and my feeble help just isn't enough.
