Mad Max and the Passionfruit Margarita
Before I go any further, I would like to address a few things that people have asked me about. Mainly this is pertaining to patient follow up, or whether I…
My Journey Through the World of Humanitarian Medicine
This was the first adventure that launched my blog.
When I was a medical student in Ireland, I started my final year of college expecting to watch closely, be a little bit useful, and learn. What I didn’t expect was to find myself operating as lead medic alone in the Panamanian jungle resuscitating a 13-year-old native boy kicked unconscious by a horse—and that was only my first day. Yikes.
So began my ten-week adventure as a part of Floating Doctors, a humanitarian group I had signed up for in a desperate attempt to salvage some value from a 2020 that ripped a calendar full of planned electives out from under me.
Despite having never shouldered real medical responsibility before, I was suddenly involved in a lifetime’s worth of bizarre patient interactions, in an unfamiliar region, dealing with everything from brain-invading worms to diabetic nerve damage to toxic pregnancies. As if that wasn’t enough, I also had jellyfish hordes, snake bites, tropical storms, and bubble gum-chewing apes to contend with at every turn.
Pushed to my limits, discovering first-hand what it truly means to feel fear, I initially floundered. As time went on, I slowly found my feet by calling on every humour-based coping mechanism I could think of. By striking up a rapport with each patient no matter how dire their circumstances, I began to turn the tide. Above all, I learned the value of asking the right questions, both in medicine and in life.
Before I go any further, I would like to address a few things that people have asked me about. Mainly this is pertaining to patient follow up, or whether I…
I stepped off the concrete path into the dirt in front of her, and gestured for her to sit down. We needed a wheelchair, fast. Somebody, a nephew, was sent…
Our third clinic of that week, which was taking precedence over Thursday base clinic, brought us to the neighboring village of Valle Escondido. It was the same community from which…
This following week would provide a much appreciated break from the madness of overnight clinics. We were staying locally, hitting three communities within thirty minutes of our base. This was…
The adrenaline based hangover lasted about a day, and by the time Friday morning came around I felt 95% of the way back to normal. I took the boat into…
Some version of me that felt slightly foreign got out of bed that Thursday morning. My phone slept in, still sleeping in rice from the night before. The death of…
I didn’t have much time to dwell on the journey. I got out of the boat, found the other Doctor Nicole, and quickly presented her case. She told me right…
Back in the rancho, a shell of a student doctor saw the remaining patients. I was distracted, stressed, and all things in between; it was not my finest work. My…
The next morning we rose groggily and got ourselves in working order. Rain was coming down now in high volumes, and low cloud coverage coloured everything of cloth with a…
One of the things I was beginning to notice on our deployments was how dire the situation had become for all things prenatal in these communities. It was thought that…