Moving Day!

So, we have officially moved to Km 8 for the rest of this mission year. We brought all of our stuff on Tuesday and immediately started a clinic after we unloaded everything. Then, after a very busy clinic, we started to get settled in our rooms. And of course, we had to kill at least one more of the same spiders that we killed during construction that just happened to be the size of my hand. So, the spider killings in total add up to 5, all the size of my hand, not counting all of the little ones. Lol. They seem to have moved out of our house for the most part because we’ve disturbed their home. Clinic had gone well so far this week. I’ve done triage, pharmacy, and dental extractions so far this week. Rachel and Stephanie have even been doing consultations to help the new doctora out. We met her on Monday, her name is Cecilia and she is very nice. She’s about the same age as Dr. Matthews. Rachel, Steph, and I are going to be living here with her for the rest of the year. I actually kind of wish we didn’t have to move here because the rest of our team lives at km 38. We’ve grown so close together, it’s kind of hard to leave. Although, we will be able to go back every Sunday to do our laundry and take a day off. We’re not quite sure what we are going to be doing next week, but I think they would like to start a regular clinic here at kilometer 8. Something interesting happened yesterday, a lady came in for a tooth extraction yesterday, but she had some sort of panic disorder. We knew she was nervous, but we didn’t know it was that bad. Caleb had anesthetized her and was in the process of extracting her tooth when she started to shake uncontrollably, like she was shivering really bad. Caleb didn’t realize it at first, but when I looked over at her, I knew something wasn’t right, I thought she was having a panic attack. We called Dr. Cecilia and it turns out that the lady was having an attack. The doctor got her to focus again and to calm down. She pinched her and applied pressure with a pen to her figure to get the lady to snap out it. After she calmed down, Caleb was able to extract the tooth just fine. Today was kind of slow as far as patients go, but I still pulled quite a few teeth. I saw several patients who had very few teeth, one lady was 48 years old and only had six teeth in her whole mouth and no molars! Towards the end of the day we had no patients, so I was just chilling in the pharmacy, then Hanna came and asked me if I could do a cleaning, so I said , Yea, sure. It was an 11 year old girl with about 3 younger siblings. I started cleaning her teeth and all of the kids started asking her if it hurt, she of course said no, because it was just a cleaning. Next thing I know, I had at least six kids hanging over my shoulders watching my every swipe of the scaler on her teeth. After they figured out that it didn’t hurt, I was soon cleaning the teeth of every single one of them. Lol. They were very cute. After clinic we had to go to someone’s home because a lady had a high fever and couldn’t walk. I was curious to see what the average Peruvians’ home looked like, and I wanted to know what was wrong with this lady. Their home was a one room, with 3 children and the parents, it was very cramped. And they had their kitchen and their laundry hung up in the same room. It made me think of the little one room houses that you read about when Americans had a big push towards the west, like Little House on the Prairie. Something very exciting happened today! I got my packages for my birthday! I’m so excited, but I’m trying to wait very patiently to open them. Also, I heard Christmas music for the first time today. It made me miss home a lot and at the same time seemed out of place here because it is So Hot! And at home, it’s pretty cold by the time Christmas season rolls around. I can’t wait for Christmas!