a few stories from volunteering

for the last three weeks i've been volunteering at hospital pablo arturo suarez, in the north of town.

It's a public hospital and is a bit of a madhouse at times. right now, i'm just in the men's internal medicine clinic but still, something wild happens every day. thought i'd share a bit. still working on photos, will try to get some of my buddies that are patients.

These days I'm working mostly with the nurses, so I do a lot of cleaning, talking, bathing and wheeling around in wheelchairs. On one of these sojourns, I had to take a patient down to have an ultrasound. On the way back up to the ward, the elevators broke. Both of them. One with people inside screaming and freaking out folks in the hallway. While we were waiting for them to come back around, three med students came up, and in typical fashion, decided repeatedly tapping the button would be of some help. I almost started counting how many people came by and thought that the more the button was pushed, the faster it would come. Some things know no cultural lines.

Anyway, these three guys started joking about how they should carry our four-wheeled friend up the stairs. He seemed okay with it, they didn't ask of course, but he told me it would be okay. I told him we didn't have to do this and that they'd have the elevator fixed soon, but i think he really trusted the med students. So when they couldn't lift him in the chair, they told him he had to walk. I negelected to mention this guy was a heart patient, and we're six flights of stairs down from the ward. He winced with every step, but once we'd started, it'd be just as bad to turn back. We made it up, but what a terrible course of events.

Another friend in internal medicine doesn't have much family and has been there for a while. They've run a bunch of tests on him, and it sounded like they said they even told him that he has HIV, which the tests showed he didn't. One of his many symptoms, among pussing sides and loss of function in his legs, is a horrible eye infection that has swelled it shut for weeks now. I wheeled him down to talk to the optomologists and an american doctor volunteering in the hospital recognized that his symptoms matched with toxitis. he ordered some more tests, and creams for his eye. After the first day, no one had run the tests, i asked all the nurses and they insisted they'd take care of it. After the second day, still nothing so i talked to the nurses again and some of the docs on the floor, again, more guarantees. After the third day, i took out his history and walked the med tech folks on the floor through the orders and insisted that we get this guy taken care of, it was only then that they said oh, yeah, we don't do those tests here. And they'd be $50 that he doesn't have anyway. at least his eye is better.