Update 8

I am now into my second week at my second placement, and over halfway done this trip. I am still working at the La Loma Luz Adventist hospital in Santa Elena, but now we are not doing maintenance.

This week we have been given the opportunity to work inside the hospital, and to shadow some of the doctors, lab technicians, and pharmacists that work here. Today, in the morning, I worked with the x-ray technician, who also takes the vital signs of all the patients that come into the hospital. Midway through the morning I began shadowing the pharmacist and she gave me access to the hospital’s entire inventory list. I watched her as she ordered new medicines and as she filled prescriptions for the patients. Nathan worked all day with Steve, the x-ray technician, and he was actually taking the x-rays by the end. During the morning while I was with the pharmacist Poppy, a boy from the King’s Children’s Home, came by to get his elbow x-rayed. I had the pleasure of reading the x-ray and help him. His elbow did turn out to be broken, apparently it happened when a team came down and took them to the park that I used to take the kids to every day and he fell off the top of the monkey bars. So now that we had determined that he had a broken elbow he needed to be casted. So I now had the opportunity to help put on his cast. They still use the paper Mache like casts here, so it was pretty messy. The entire time I was helping them out Poppy kept smiling and saying, “Your Ben!” I was glad that the children still remembered me.

On Monday, on the way back to drop everyone off to their placements we stopped off at the orphanage so that Laura could do some filming. This gave me some time to go into the home and say hello to the cooks and some of the kids that were home. I got to see Amelia again, and she still remembered me.

So throughout this week Nathan and I are being given the chance to work inside the hospital shadowing different people. On Wednesday we were supposed to watch a surgery which was postponed until May, so we will be unable to see it. I was able to shadow a doctor during one morning, but most of the week was spent helping with the vital signs and x-ray technician.

Looking back on this placement I enjoyed it a lot. This was the placement that I really wanted to do, and I have now been able to complete it. These two weeks have flown by; we are now more than halfway through our trip, with somewhere around 40 days left to go. We now head into another break from placements, where we are all living and working together.

thats all for now