13 – 17 Feb 2012
Welcome back to our clinic!
I didn’t take nearly as many pictures as I intended to last trip, and I ended up getting pretty sick early on in this trip, so once again, I don’t actually have a ton of pictures from this part of the trip. But we all pooled our photos afterwards, so I’ll include some of those here:
Photo by Mary
Being scrubbed in and doing cases also doesn’t help the being able to take pictures situation:
Photo by Mary
But I did find this fun dinosuar hat:
Photo by Chris Thomsen
which I absolutely commandeered and made mine 🙂
Photo by Chris
My room was once again laparoscopic cases, hernias and other smaller procedures; bigger cases, like ortho, went in to the other room, where Cindy and Turner ran the show:
Photo by Larson
and helped repair some… creative… work that had been done previously:
The week also included Rich’s birthday:
and, since it was once again carnival week, a water fight:
On one of our rare afternoons free, I wandered into town:
to the market:
where I met Javier:
Who makes jewelry from tagua:
A nut ivory which looks like this before it’s polished and sometimes dyed:
We ended up chatting for about 2 hours, mostly in Spanish (with a bit of Spanglish thrown in when I got stuck), during which time he made this necklace:
It was beautiful, but definitely a bit too much for me- I’m not much of a jewelry person, but I liked this bead so he turned it into a necklace for me:
(I also bought one of those chunky bracelets behind my left shoulder for my sister)
Unfortunately, I ended up getting pretty sick a couple days in and had absolutely no appetite, so I ended up getting daily IVs:
Photo by Larson
and wandered around the clinic taking pictures and rehydrating until I felt ok enough to not pass out when I scrubbed in:
Photo by Cindy
But most nights, the IV followed me back to our hotel (the upside of being on a medical mission), where we had to get a bit creative in our hanging:
But despite not feeling well and slacking a bit in the middle of the week, this awesome group of people worked so incredibly hard for the patients here in Cuenca. I’m very proud to be part of this family:
On our last day, we took the traditional bus trip up the mountain overlooking the city:
Visited a local pottery shop:
And went out for a fancy dinner before crashing after a long, productive week.
Goodnight, Cuenca!