Jennifer-First Days

Amy and I arrived on Monday morning eager to see what this airport thing was all about. It was indeed quite a crazy scene!! I did accidentally hire a nice young man, mostly because I had a duffle bag I was very tired of carrying and he knew that. After some negotiating, we agreed on $2 and half of my airport sandwich. Next time I will repeat to myself, "Get the cart, get the cart." We arrived at the clinic around 10:00 and began a whirlwind day of seeing patients, orienting to the storage areas and small intense conversations with Donna and JoAnn about communication, translators, culture, documentation. My head was very full and we were very tired from our 3:30 wake up!! All of us rode back together through the unbelievable streets of the market, packed with wall to wall people (who walk in the streets dodging cars like a video game). There was one puzzling detail about the ride. A woman riding with us needed to get out to buy some garlic. We sat for 15 or 20 minutes and waited for her. Donna named her the garlic lady. She never came back so our driver said, "We will leave." Interesting. So we left, then 15 or so minutes later she called and (of course) needed a ride, so we turned back to get her, through the market streets all over again!! I was taking many pictures of this unreal scene of pill sellers and vendors. On Tuesday we arrived at the clinic 2 hours early to accomodate Donna and JoAnn getting to the airport on time. I enjoyed practicing walking around and saying "Bonjour!" to the staring faces and watching them light up and respond to that. It is important to me that they understand we want to help them. We had a great day, the translators were eager and willing to be present and helpful, we saw many orthopedic patients, back pain, a man with an ACL tear from 7 years ago who was swelling, lots of hand trauma (thank goodness we had an OT there from another therapy effort nearby.) Many patients are returning from being seen before. They are very compliant!! Amy helped one woman I had seen the day before and diagnosed her bad kidney infection that I had missed. She handled it great. She and another PT who was visiting got her a lab test and she will return tomorrow for results. After the day, Gibson told us that we had seen more patients that day than any other day yet!! We were excited about that. The most exciting thing was at the very end of the day an enormous shipment of bottled water arrived. Everyone from the entire hospital came out to see. Cases and cases and cases of water. Hospital workers were carrying water inside and the workers unloaded it into a huge mound of cases of water right at the loading dock. We were hoping some of it would make it to the patients. We were a little distracted as we thought about where all those 50,000 plastic bottles would end up. Let's just say its not in the local Deffenbaugh recylcing center. All in all I was very happy to get our first day under our belt, no pun intended!!