Shrek is Love
Her mother follows silently and enters the room behind us. We sat down in the dark. I took off my headlamp, and using a plastic bag I found lying around,…
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.
Her mother follows silently and enters the room behind us. We sat down in the dark. I took off my headlamp, and using a plastic bag I found lying around,…
I woke up on the morning of our third deployment to some welcome news via email; my request to the college for a one month extension to my placement was…
There have been some interesting developments in the last few hours, and I am going to break slightly from the pre-ordained chronology of these posts for just a moment. On…
Sleep was a bit stressful for me that night, the paranoia from having already caused one partial collapse of the dilapidated schoolhouse kept me scared stiff in my hammock. In…
Tuesday morning, 6:26. A loud crash woke me up, jolting me in bed like a startled rat. A swimming pool of water must have been dropped on the casito roof…
First on the agenda for Monday involved chasing down all the loose ends from the previous week. I put together a bundle of medications to be posted to a gas…
Surely enough the digestion began and continued into the weekend, or should I say indigestion, because over the follow three days I developed diarrhea and stomach pains. This usually happens…
The mountain gets cold at night, something that I failed to adequately prepare for, and I froze my little tush off in the hammock overnight. Houses of la SabanaResident Bonehead…
We began our ascent towards La Sabana at 7 in the morning. We had one pack horse with us, and our horse-man Oligio was to be our companion. He was…
There was already a crowd of people assembling at the concrete path that lined the main artery of the village. I came up to find the horse, standing idly, as…