Atención en Salud

I think I’ll write about the health care class first, even though we started Pequeños Pasitos first. The health care system here has three levels, and so far we’ve been working at a clinic on the first level—primary care. I got paired with David last week. We shadowed the family physician pretty much the whole morning. We got to listen to people’s lungs and take blood pressures—I took the blood pressureof a woman who was very hypertensive—it turned out she had high blood pressure and hadn’t been taking her medication. We saw some pregnant woman. They don’t have an ultrasound, so they take a measurement of the belly and listen to the baby’s heartbeat with a stethoscope. We saw an infected penis—David and I were shy at first about watching this examination, but it seems if you’re wearing a white coat people will pretty much let you do anything. I think they doctor gave him antibiotics and a basic lab workup--I don’t think they have the capability for gram stains and stuff like that in these little clinics. Oh yeah, we observed a female genital exam too. Then yesterday we went to that clinic again when we got there someone was giving a presentation (charlas) about pregnancy. It seemed like the women had come specifically for the charlas because there were several pregnant women sitting in the first couple rows (this was in the waiting room). Then David and I gave a presentation we’d put together about hypertension. We handed out brochures and talked then through it and then gave a little quiz and handed out mints as prizes. Some of the people were bored, but a surprizing number were really interested and participated. We left some brochures for the clinic to use too. Who knows, maybe we prevented some chronic diseases!

The rest of the time, David and I gave out vaccines and learned how to draw blood. Unfortunately there was only one vaccine patient there, so only I got to give a vaccine. Then we drew each other’s blood—it was relatively easy for me because David’s veins are easy, but he wasn’t able to get blood from me because it really hurt—apparently my veins are good for learning on.