18-22 Feb 2019
I don’t have a lot of pictures from during the week, as I spend most of the day scrubbing our cases. This year, we once again had to do any case requiring an overnight stay at one of the local hospitals, so we split our surgical crew in half and I stayed at the clinic doing general surgery cases- mostly gallbladders and hernias, some circumcisions when Dr. Eddy joins us (which he did most mornings). This is me and Dr. Eddy:
He’s a local pediatric surgeon, and he totally rocks. I’ve learned the names of most of the surgical instruments in Spanish from him, and even if I forget to translate partway through our cases, he always manages to make things work.
Most of our equipment is brought in used by the various surgical crews that cycle through the clinic, but this tower looks pretty new!
Unfortunately, it flaked out at the beginning of the week during one of my lap choles so we had to use the old tube TV set-up, but it worked just fine on our last day for this knee scope:
The image quality was so much better than our old monitor!
Minor surgery:
Me, carrying a patient to post-op:
Photo by Summer Marsh
We usually try to keep the surgical schedule light on Fridays, to make up for the fact that we work past dinner most days and to give anyone working in the OR a chance to explore Cuenca, which is a pretty cool city:
This year, the textile market, which is usually a fun place to peruse and find blankets and scarves and other woven goods to bring home, had shrunk significantly.
Fortunately, Javier was still running his shop- he makes jewelry out of tagua, a nut ivory. Every time I’m in Cuenca, I make a point of visiting him and we sit for an hour or two and talk, mostly in Spanish, with a bit of spanglish thrown in when I forget a word- it’s great practice!
Me, Javier and Heather
Our group has made a lot of connections over the years- one of them works with Continental tires and set up a tour for us!
We weren’t able to take pictures inside, but it really was quite fascinating to see the tire-making process.
Even though the days can be long, surgery week always flies by, and before I knew it, the week was done and we were packing up for part 2 of our trip- an excursion to the jungle!