A Day as a Doctor

Así es la vida of the Hearts in Motion doctors.

Today, I stepped in the shoes of the medical personnel with Hearts in Motion.  First, it's important to understand the working environment Hearts in Motion has.   A half an hour outside the hotel in the actual city of Zacapa lies the Regional Hospital of Zacapa.  It is the only hospital serving the nearly 200,000 people that live in the region of Zacapa, one of the 22 regions that make up the country of Guatemala.

A hospital in this condition would scare the majority of the United States.  Patients have zero privacy and the majority of the rooms have five beds.  The most common thing to see is just a room full of beds, each one holding a man or woman in poor condition with just an IV drip.  None of the patients had heart monitors or equipment at their bedside and only two or three nurses watched over the thirty patients in the ward.

Hearts in Motion has added their own additions to the hospital grounds.  The speech and hearing group operates out of a beautiful therapy center nearby.  Right next door to the therapy center is a prosthetic lab led by man named Luis.  He explained to me the process of baking the mold for the plastic form, and showed me the form for a forty-year old man named Arturo that had lost his leg to diabetes.

For surgery, the wards used by Hearts in Motion are the men's ward, women's ward, pediatrics ward, and the operating room.  The doctors shared the four operating rooms with the Guatemalan surgeons in the hospital.  Patients went in and out of the room all day long from a boy who fell out of a mango tree to a patient of Hearts in Motion who had a tumor on the side of his neck.

From all sides of the surgical and medical process, Hearts in Motion has brought only the best of the best to serve the people of Zacapa.

Así es la vida of Dr. Amy Meredith.

Dr. Meredith is a speech pathologist from WSU Spokane.  She is the leader of the small group of students in past blogs that administer the speech and hearing testing.  This is her third trip to Guatemala with Hearts in Motion.  Adopting two children with cleft palates herself, she has a personal connection with the mission of the trip.  Her son, Alisher, was adopted from Kazakhstan with a bilateral cleft palate.  Bringing him to the States, he received the necessary surgeries to correct his condition. Her daughter, Jasmine, was adopted from China and had a unilateral cleft palate that has also been corrected.  Dr. Meredith's wisdom from her experience before, during and after cleft palate revision adds a new level to her ability to help her clients.  She also understands the difficulties of babies with cleft palettes and has brought special bottles to feed newborn infants with cleft.  Tomorrow she will be giving a lecture to the nurses in the Regional Hospital of Zacapa to teach more about the bottles and cleft in newborn babies.

Así es la vida of Dr. Ken Stein.

A plastic surgeon from Chicago, he had four surgeries today.  They included a tumor on the side of a man's face, a cleft palate revision and a reconstruction of a woman's lips.  On his feet from early morning to his last surgery at four in the afternoon, his stamina is remarkable.  On his eighth trip with Hearts in Motion, he is a frequent flyer to Guatemala.  I asked him about his most interesting case in all that time and he laughed remembering the case of a 13-year-old girl on a past trip.  He told me how she had come to Hearts in Motion because a dresser her fallen on her face when she was little and had crushed her cheek bone and killed the facial nerves that controlled her right eyelid.  She lost sight in her eye and there was nothing Dr. Stein could do for the most part but the thing he noticed the most was the smell that came off the girl.   He asked the family about the smell and they told him she had had it for ten years.  After anesthesia was administered, he searched for the source.  He ultimately found a bean in her left nostril that she had stuck into her nose as a three-year-old.  Sitting in her nose for ten years, it was no wonder she smelled.

The process I was closest to- and that I actually became a part of- was within the post-operative wards.

Así es la vida of Priscilla.  She basically runs the entire
 post-operative process for Hearts in Motion.  I became her right hand today as we checked up on patients, filled their needs, filled prescriptions of Tylenol with codeine, ibuprofen, and antibiotics, and communicated with the Guatemalan nurses the needs of the Hearts in Motion patients.  Priscilla is impressive, to say the least.  Her experience is in NICU or the newborn infant ICU at Sacred Heart Hospital.  She now works at Mount Carmel Hospital in Coeur D'Alene.  With only a small table in the back of the pediatrics ward, she wrote out all of the post-op instructions for each patient in Spanish.  I helped translate as we attended to each patient that had gone through surgery the day before.  Some kids had had parts of their hip bone used as bone grafts for their palette and were already walking around.  There was also a baby that had spilled hot water on itself and had bad burns on its chest and face.  Working nonstop throughout the day, Priscilla is honestly wonder woman.  I had to work hard to keep up with her.



Walking in the shoes of the medical staff of Hearts in Motion, they are truly big shoes to fill.  Working long days in humid weather and poor conditions, the medical and surgical staff are truly incredible people who are fueled by their love for their work, the people they serve and the mission of Hearts in Motion.