Clinical Day 1

At 6:30am we woke to the hymn-singing alarm and pulled on yesterday's clothes (seeing we still didn't have our bags). I double checked my backpack and made sure it still contained the fruit and walnut salad I'd bought from Macdonalds with my airport voucher. Word had it that spaggetti was sometimes served for breakfast, and I wasn't positive I'd be down for that in the AM.

Breakfast time

As we sat down to eat at the long skinny table (so narrow that one plane could not directly fit in front of the other, but they were all diagonally placed from eachother) I couldn't help but notice the hotel worker who sat down nearby with a hearty plate of morning spaghetti noodles. It was a pleasant surprise when the arrived with a dish of white toast, eggs and bananas. I tried not to be extremely conspicuous...but I pretty well dove for the bananas. It's really the only fruit we're permitted to eat here, since we peel it ourselves. Besides that, I had my fruit & walnut Macdonald salad that had had some extra baking time in my bag, on the two hour trip from Port-au-Prince. The apple slices were not ashamed to reveal such truth. I ate them anyway. A Weeks without an apple for a week, is sad one. Alan wouldn't survive.

When we arrived at the YFC base, there were already over 100 patients waiting outside to see the doctor. It wasn't even 8am and they had been told that the doctor wouldn't arrive until 9am. That didn't matter to them; they would wait all day if they needed to. While they waited, a man stood in front and gave them the gospel.

The cabinet we used to organize our meds

In the meantime, Steph and I begin making the best set up with what we had. There were two back rooms with doors that closed, a main room and an entry way. In the small back room to the right, we placed two chairs. This would be the doctors room, where she would see the patient. In the other room, there were counters, a cabinet and a sink. With Sarah and Jon's help, we begin unpacking all the medications and categorizing them by classifications – antibiodics, cardio, anti-inflammatories, respiratory meds. I was slightly beginning to realize the desperate need in everything, and the fact that it was up to us to make do with what we had.

In the main room, we placed chairs for a few patients to be ushered in from outside, right before they would see the doctor.

There was no way Steph and I were doing assessments with our lack of Stethoscopes and BP cuffs (all with our lost baggage), so we decided with the doctor, Suzy, that we would retrieve the patient's drugs when they came to us with their prescription. We had no clue what a job this would actually be...

Steph and I both sat in on Suzy's first assessment. It was a young boy with red and yellow around his big eyes – perhaps a topical infection from an allergy. He also complained of abdominal pain. Worms. When we ushered him into the med room to give him his meds (after trying to decipher the doctors handwriting), we came upon our first delema We had no plastic bags. We couldn't send each person away with full bottles of meds.

The medicine counter where Steph, Sarah, Jonathan and I
worked to give medications to each patient.

The next 15 minutes were hectic. The patients started coming faster than we could dole out the medications. We quickly set up chairs in the hall and had them wait outside the med room, while we made containers out of paper, ripped out of my notebook. We started getting team members on the outside construction to fold boats out of the looseleaf, so we could drop the meds inside and write the dose on the outside – finalizing it with a piece of medical tape so the pills didn't drop out.

I was losing my cool pretty quickly. I was unfamiliar with half the med names and we started trying to hurry the process by dumping med bottles out of their cardboard boxes and pouring pills in them. I'm pretty sure we all started praying out loud. Our minds were spinning. We had a horrible time reading the doctors writing and kept on having to interrupt her sessions to ask questions, and we were trying to keep things as clean as possible, but do the fastest job as possible. And just when I wasn't sure if I could take it anymore...God stepped in.

Al and another man from the mission arrived with these perfect little plastic bags. They were even meant for medication and had a spot to fill in what med, the dose and the time you took it. It was better than we could have asked for. Slowly, a system was created and by 10:30pm, Al came in to say “good job” and “you have seen 23 patients out of 100.”

It wasn't long in the day before that turned to 150. From where we worked in the med room, we could hear the people singing outside as they waited, we could hear the children playing in the yard – popping their heads up at the window every now and again to call our names. We tried to maximize the air coming from the one fan in the room, without having it blow away the medication sheets - And things settled into a good routine.

We begin working quickly and together – Steph, Sarah, Dorothy and I pouring the meds and Jonathan would take them to the waiting patients and explain how to take them. Reading, retrieving, pouring, labelling, giving. We kept moving to keep the waiting patients down stopping at lunch, two at a time for 10 minutes each, to enjoy some peanut butter and jelly on white buns, pop and chips. (I really have a lot to adjust to). And I have to say, that all the while I was loving it. I loved fulfilling this immediate need and working to adjust a problem according to what was best at the moment. It was using what we had and being dependent on the Lord for the rest – and it was serving those who couldn't give back in return. I didn't feel constricted with all the legal and ethical business of the real hospitals at home.

It wasn't in the plans to run out of important medications so quickly...but we did. Benadryl, Atenolol, Ibuprofen... She begin to perscribe Tylenol instead, but we quickly ran out of that...so we doubled the dose of the children's Tyelenol. It wasn't long before that was gone also. Al drove to find some, but came back with two solution bottles – 15$ each. We gave our last and just gave what we were able.

While children were waiting, dolls and lollipops were given to them. It was the best to see the smile on their faces and their parents would tell them “dit thank you”. The smile was enough.

By 3pm, I was taking every moment I could to sit down on an overturned bucket. I must have drunk all the water I could, but seeing it was continually leaking out of my face, it only helped for a short time.

By 4pm, we had done it. Our team had served the 150 people that waited all day in the sun to see the doctor. They would have come back and waited the next day if that's what it took. That's how valuable it was to them. At times, I had taken a quick pause to walk out into the yard, they were sitting in clusters, some singing and some talking – watching their children play and waiting more patiently than any North American patients I've seen. I thought our waiting room was bad.

With so many essential medications drained, I'm not sure how we plan to make it through another clinical day. It will probably end up being more a half day, but again we will just have to do the best with what we have left-over.

When the clinic was done, we joined the party of children in the yard being chased by “les blancs”, getting piggy-backs and making us play their intense jump-rope games. I could barely jump the rope as it smacked the back of my flip-flops (and clearly, it was more often that I didn't).

Our luggage arrived right before the end of the work day – Praise the Lord :) So we headed back to the hotel to unpack. We finally had our swimsuits for the pool (not that that stopped us from going in our clothes the previous day).

If I chose any day to drown, it would have probably been this evening. I felt pretty lethargic from the days events. Some people might even say they'd eat anything after that days work, but somehow the manure-rice dish still didn't appeal to me. (It seems to be a favourite around here). Thankfully they had another option too - there was also a pasta option tonight. Fries and pasta and pop it was.

Tomorrow is another day at the YFC base. Daycamp and construction. Now. Now is sleep.