Since today is technically a holiday in CFHI world – the new students are doing orientation – instead of starting a new rotation, I went back, with Dr. Santivañez’s invitation (“What else would you be doing?” she asked me) to servicio de adolescentes. You guys are probably totally sick of hearing about this rotation but I kind of like it, so I will keep talking about it. Two things happened today:
1. I got to hold a child – like really, really hold it. Meaning, if I let go, it would fall and die. I had someone’s else life in my hands for a very long 5 minutes. The most surprising part was that I actually enjoyed it (it was a quiet child). She was pretty heavy in my arms, like holding a dog, and she sat in my arms silently, looking around with that unique child curiosity. Slowly, I’m coming around to thinking like my gender. Before, I wanted a child but only after it passed the toddler ages. Now I’m okay with a baby, but not with the giving birth part yet. One of these days…
2. Our homely, demure, donated instruments started failing us, one by one. First, the Doppler machine started wailing – it’s been wailing its low battery siren for the past few days now, but we had chosen to ignore it, until today, when it refused to do anything except wail in its piercing voice. I’m not sure which sound is worse, a crying baby or a crying Doppler machine. Both are eardrum-piercing and headache inducing after long-term exposure. Anyways, a patient later our BP machine did the same thing, except silently. So now we had patients coming in for prenatal checkups and we couldn’t check their BP nor their baby’s fetal heartbeats. Later, another doctor lent us a mini-doppler machine that turned out to not be able to pick up nada (nothing). It just statically sheeped (that’s not a word, I know) at us. Not to be deterred, the doctor continued to utilize the non-functioning mini-doppler machine on each patient that came on the prenatal visit, each time muttering that it’s useless. I’m pretty sure she kept up the charade specifically to make sure the patient didn’t feel as though they came for nothing.
At the end of the day, a girl came in who wanted an IUD put in but the clinic had run out, so Dr. Santivañez told her to come back Thursday instead. On my way out, I glanced at the trashcan – it still had the smeared blood on it from last Thursday. I think the doctor noticed and called the janitor woman. When the doctor questioned why the janitor woman wasn’t wearing gloves, she mentioned that they had none (or had run out).
Other than all of that, things went pretty smoothly.
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