A Week of Surgery – 2014

(and if you’re curious, yes, that is a reusable grounding pad stuck to the tower- don’t judge, we make do with what we’ve got)

Since most of the laparoscopic cases get done in this room, those supplies are stacked in the corner of the room; the remainder of our supplies line the halls just outside:

This is the big OR:

and we’ll do our ortho cases here (since they have bigger setups):

Over in my room, someone stole my table!

so I grabbed a spare cart and made do (though my table cover just barely covered it! so much space for such a small setup!)

…and apparently I don’t have any pictures of me doing surgery this time?  Strange, but we did get a lot of cases done this week.  Here’s Brent recovering one of our lap chole patients:

I even made it over to the dental side of things and found Skip hard at work!

One of our patients baked a strawberry cheesecake as a thank you:

It was quite tasty, and well timed, as we kinda just grab lunch whenever there’s a short break in cases and I hadn’t found that time until this snack arrived.

After a long day of work, we’d usually just head back to our hotel and recover for a bit:

sometimes that extended into the night, especially when we learned that the country would be going dry due to the upcoming election (we’re good Wisconsinites so we planned ahead and stocked up):

but we also made sure to get out and explore the town as well- here’s the fruit market:

slash meat market:

Bulk grains:

measured out on this cool old scale:

Passionfruit from the market:

you bite/smash the bottom shell off and then eat the innards out:

and then you’re left with a sea anemone:

One night we went out for a fancy dinner:

Dona found a party hat!

and wandered down to the Wonderbar after:

Played a little foosball:

Girls in scarves:

One afternoon, we came across a small performance in the square at this church:

(most days, the square was just full of full of pigeons and occasionally people crazy enough to try to feed them):

Street vendors selling fruits out of wheelbarrows:

and on our last day, we made sure to finish early so we could take a drive to another part of the city, across the Rio Tomebamba:

(if you look closely, you can see us in the reflection in the upper right window):

to deliver supplies to an orphanage:

We also brought soccer balls and played with the kids:

They were pretty good!

and stickers:

giving Steve hair

Stickers ended up everywhere:

Then we walked over to one final dinner

I picked the breading off this guy and he had eyes… couldn’t eat him after that!

Fireworks on our way home:

A nice way to end another productive week here!