The Hosptial and The Habitat

Today we toured two hospitals. I should maybe first explain that the “Junta” is the organization we are working with down here. It is an organization that sells lottery tickets in Guayaquil to fund their community projects. I don’t know how many hospitals they run down here but I think that there are at least four in Guayaquil because there are four hospitals that we will be working in.
So today we toured the Luis Vernaza Hospital and the Childrens Hospital. We first toured the Luis Vernaza General Hospital. It was founded in 1564 and is one of the oldest in Latin America. I don’t know if the woman giving us the tour was exaggerating or not, but she kept saying that it was the biggest hospital in all of Ecuador, and whether or not the superlative is really true, I can attest that the hospital truly is gigantic. It even has its own free standing Catholic cathedral within the quad of the hospital! Awesome.
It was really a neat experience. It is definitely different than the hospitals that we are all used to. Probably the biggest difference that I first noticed is the lack of privacy the patients have. They had bed after bed all lined up against the walls with just like 1 foot spaces in between the beds in some of the rooms and no curtains or anything in between; they had people being treated in beds with IV therapy out in the “waiting room” of the ER; all of which for Americans who have been totally HIPPA brainwashed can seem absolutely unfathomable.
But here’s the thing: I am not going to say that everything else was the same as our hospitals, because it definitely is not, but I think that I am really starting to see that we didn’t come down here really on a medical “mission” to save everybody. Instead, we came here to learn from them. They do things simpler here. In all of my clinicals, I don’t think that I have ever actually calculated and timed a drip rate of an IV bag. If it has a specific rate, we just put it on a pump and type in the rate. But today, I think I only saw maybe 2 IV pumps in the entire 800 bed hospital. And I ask myself, “Does that really matter?” They have their suctioning going into old pop bottles where we have them in clean new plastic containers, but again, when it all is just stuff you are trying to get out of the patient and you will be throwing it away, does it need to be put into a sterile container? No. They use jugs of water instead of the fancy weights we do to do traction (see picture below), but is the outcome any different? No.

Everything is just simpler here. They may not have all of the “up-to-date” technology that we have in the States, but they get the job done. They also are doing stem cell implants here which is something we aren’t really even doing yet in the U.S. due to all of our “safety” regulations. I don’t mean to downplay the U.S., I am grateful and proud to be an American, but I was definitely humbled today.
We then toured the Childrens Hospital which due to the profits from the Lotto tickets and from other people’s donations looks almost identical to Primary Childrens Hospital. Not much to comment there. After that we went to the Parque Histórico Guayaquil. They had a kind of zoo thing with a lot of the native animals, a part with a lot of the old buildings they had taken down from the old central of Guayaquil and rebuilt in the park with a lot of the original materials and everything. They also had gardens of banana trees, cocoa bean trees and other garden items, and of course, another Catholic cathedral.

All in all, it was a good day. We were all pretty tired by the time we made it back to the hotel tonight, but I am excited for church tomorrow—in Spanish! Yay! I am also really excited to get out in the community and work with the people in their own homes because right now I still feel like a tourist. Validation of those feelings came when we were at the Maxi Mart buying some groceries and this woman came up to me to ask me if I needed help (picking tuna) aka find out who in the heck all of these 22 people (I can’t say girls because there are 3 guys with us) all dressed in white polos and navy scrub bottoms were. I told her that we were nursing students down here to work a little in the hospitals and she asked me which hospitals we were working in and I told her and she was like, “Well then, how did you get HERE?!” I had NO idea where we were so I was just like, “Uhhhh. . . I don’t know. We just went to this park and then we got in these vans and they brought us here. . .” Awesome. Tourist.
Okay, that is all for tonight. Sorry about the length. But enjoy it while it lasts as I am sure this word count probably won’t continue.