El Alto otra vez

I made a big deal about wanting a full week at Hospital Los Andes with Dr. Gutierrez because I wanted to learn how to work with children, especially the crying children (apparently holding their hands down by force or tying them up in their sweater like a straight jacket works pretty well if you don’t mind going deaf while doing it). So, this week, Tuesday – Friday, I signed up to go back to El Alto. Except that when I got up at 6am on Tuesday, before dawn, I couldn’t make it out of bed. I needed to eat before ascending another 500m into the air, and the sight of food nauseated me. So I sent some texts to Cecilia and Gonzalo, hoping that they would receive them soon, and collapsed back into bed to sleep. I slept until noon, at lunch, read a while in bed, and then fell asleep again until 6pm. Got a light dinner, went back home, read a little, and was asleep by 10pm. Ahh, the adventurous life of a traveler…

This morning, after getting about 30 hours of sleep the day before, I felt energized. I ate a large breakfast full of peanut butter and Coca-cola and ran down the still deserted streets of La Paz to meet the doctor at 7:15am. Since I never got an answer neither from Gonzalo nor Cecilia, I was worried that they may not have ever received the message, thus never letting Dr. Gutierrez know that I wasn’t coming. Thus, she may have assumed I wasn’t coming the entire week and not meet me this morning on the steps of the church. Luckily, I was wrong on one of the points – Dr. Gutierrez did meet me on the steps but she never got the message that I wasn’t coming yesterday and she was worried that something happened. Even worse, a doctor at the hospital in El Alto told her he rode the micro with a gringuita, and Dr. Gutierrez had the horrible thought that I had disappeared somewhere in El Alto. Thankfully, it isn’t in the culture of Bolivians to worry too much, and today everything was okay.

We saw children from 9-12:30pm and examined everyone from newborn babies only 5 days old to 10 year olds. The older ones are much easier to check the throats of because they actually understand instructions of open your mouth and stick out your tongue, but the newborns are so much nicer because they can’t push you away with the tiny arms (muahaha). We saw a girl with scabies, many kids with gripe (flu), and a baby with a vaginal infection. I am getting really good at examining genitals, thanks to parents who never clean them.