I'm scheduled to depart Ecuador tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM, so this will be my last update from Ecuador, though not my final post on this blog-- I've got to finish the story! I apologize for going nearly a week without a post-- I've had a sore throat that entire time and I lost my camera so I couldn't post any new pictures. I'm now feeling mostly better and am two days into a five-day course of azithromycin, taken on the off-chance that our friend Streptococcus is trying to give me Rheumatic fever or glomerulonephritis. But the past week hasn't been as bad as I just made it sound-- I never had a fever and, apart from my throat, actually felt ok most of the time. I saw more births this week as well-- vaginal and Cesaerean-- and got to scrub in for the first time on a couple surgeries, a cholecystectomy and a fibular reduction and rod placement. I also saw a plastic surgery for a boy with extensive facial scarring from a burn, a tubal ligation, a couple other surgeries, and some interesting inpatient cases. On Wednesday, five other students in the program each gave a brief presentation on a tropical illness (I picked Giardiasis and Amebiasis-- diarrhea, yessss!) to the pediatrician who was our preceptor, and she shared some of her knowledge of tropical medicine with us after each of us finished.
I also really enjoyed the non-clinical part of my time in Chone, in which I got to do exactly what I pleased. After finishing up at the hospital around one, my companions and I would trek thirty-five minutes back across town to our homestay, where we consistently had the best food I've ever eaten in Latin America. After lunch, I'd nap for a bit under the oscillating fans, then read for hours on end. I knocked out Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions over the course of twenty-eight hours, finished memorizing all 501 verbs of 501 Spanish Verbs (I already knew most of them, so it's not that big of a deal), and almost finished going through Evangelio Segun Juan (The Gospel According to John), on which I'll probably be leading a Bible study this semester. My colleague Sarang, a Hindu, and I had some enlightening conversations about our faiths and our ideas about what makes life rich and meaningful-- I read a bit in a few of his books, Flow by Mihaly Csikzentmihaly (good stuff which echoed a lot of what I learned about flow and being in the zone in Buddhism class), Awakening Hippocrates by Edward O'neill, Jr., and The Teaching of the Bhagavad Gita by Swami Uberlonglastname. I also got comfortable fooling around with my medical iPhone apps, which I'll probably start relying on this year as I learn pharmacology and pathology. Last and certainly least, I started teaching myself the Moonwalk... gotta long way to go on that one, though!
I'm glad I came. Trying to wrap all of my experiences here up in a paragraph or two is a toughie... kinda reminds me of a poem I wrote in January about how our deepest feelings can't be captured by words or even by the left-brain thinking to which we're so accustomed. With it, I end my efforts, which I hope have resulted in new fields of thought for you all:
The ocean of unfiltered feeling
Fights the force that gives it frame.
Words and thoughts, the airy sky
To which the great white sea sublimes--
But oh how slow, the wait, the pain!
The wisdom of a million winters
Takes as long to yield its gain
And so I wait, and as I wait
I've watched a sunset and a storm or two--
The mark of the unbridled real
Transcends what here I try to do.
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