Phase 2

When planning this trip, I realized that the first phase (pap smears) would end just a week and a half before UT’s spring break, a popular time to plan mission trips because medical students are eager to join for the week.  I decided to try to stay down here and then join up with a new group when they arrived.  For a while, this was all rather hypothetical and my mom was more than a little concerned when I bought a one way ticket to Guatemala…  Eventually everything was coordinated, and is turning out better than I expected.  The spring break trip is led by Coral Matus, a family practitioner that has a very significant place in my life in that she’s the one that created the crisis in my life last spring when I worked with her and realized that maybe I needed to go into family medicine instead of ob/gyn!  She has been a tremendous source of support, encouragement, and advice over the last year and she seems to effortlessly balance her family, her Toledo patients, her teaching, her dedication to Guatemala, and the countless other things she does while being one of the most skilled and compassionate physicians I have encountered.  In short, if I can be half the doctor she is I’ll be thrilled, and I plan to learn as much from her as I can, and to keep her on speed dial when I return to California!

Back to the trip: a large group is coming down from Toledo (Coral, a family medicine resident, a pediatrician, a pediatric resident, two nurses, a teacher, and two med students) for the week.  A few will join me tomorrow and we’ll spend Friday and Saturday working with a local midwife named Catalina.  Coral has a special interest in working to start a training school for local comadronas (midwives), so the focus for these few days will be learning about their informal training (as it exists now), their practices, and their needs.  Orfe, Ismael, and I stopped by Catalina’s house yesterday to let her know we were coming and she was welcoming and excited.  Fingers crossed for a few deliveries while we’re there! 

The rest of the group will join us on Sunday and Monday for a week of clinic in two different locations.  Clinic will focus mostly on obstetrics, women’s health, and pediatrics, although I’ve already run into a number of men and people with general health problems that are planning to come, so it should be busy.  Having this more general week of clinic was something that really helped me get through our project the first month.  Due to the large volume of patients, we often found ourselves saying, “Sorry, we can only do pap smears” as patients approached us with other health concerns, including those of their children, husbands, neighbors, etc.  Sometimes we wondered if they thought, “How incompetent these American doctors are that only know how to do pap smears!” – most of the local doctors are general practitioners.  When I asked one doctor what his specialty was he replied, “Yo soy ‘hago lo todo.’”  I repeated the phrase as if it were one word before realizing what it means: “hago lo todo” translates into “I do it all.”  Pretty accurate description!  In the chaos of the first month, I was reassured knowing that I would have a time on this trip to participate in a truly comprehensive clinic.  We frequently told people about the upcoming clinic to feel better that we couldn’t tend to their extended medical needs at the time – a move I may regret if our clinics are filled with hundreds of patients next week!