What is sleep?

Whew!!! Campaign week is over!!! Out of all of the medical campaigns that we have done this year, this one was probably the hardest for me. It seemed like there was an endless amount of work to be done and most definitely not enough people. Poor Rachel was in the pharmacy quite often by herself, but sometimes had help from others. Jenessa and Wendy did triage for about 300 people per day with the help of a lady from Dr. Matson’s team during the week. We had, at most times, four medical students, and during part of each day Dr. Matson or Dr. Matthews would see patients. I, of course, was holed up in my dental room seeing anywhere from thirty to forty patients a day, more often thirty. Hanna ended up being the Jack-of-all-trades. The first day, she was helping me, the second day she was helping to get consent forms signed, then she ended up testing people for glasses, and finally on the last day she helped to pass out some of the 7,500 worm meds to the surrounding community. We were stretched pretty thin as a team this week, but everything got done that needed to be done!
During this week a team from Eastern Virginia Medical school came down to continue a research project that they have been working on with AMOR for the past three years. The ideal goal is to successfully de-parasite the community of Porto Carrero (where I live) and the adjoining neighborhood Nueva Amazonia. A part of Dr. Matson’s team would walk around the entire neighborhood, which is pretty huge, and survey the families in each home and then ask them for a fecal sample to be tested at the laboratory. Each day we would have people coming in to give us these samples and they would be stored in a trash bag until the end of the day when they would be taken to the lab.
It was such a super busy week! But probably one of the best weeks of my time here in Peru. The team that came down was so much fun to work with and to hang out with. During the week we also had 3 BIRTHS!!!!!! One on late Saturday night, the other early Sunday morning, and the third was born on Thursday! Wow! That was so much work and we only had one set of sheets and towels for birthing!!! We ended up using some of our own sheets and towels for the second birth since it was so close to the first. I´m convince that the full moon we´ve been having is responsible for this! And I´m pretty sure I won´t be an OB/GYN. Births are cool and all, and seeing the new born baby with his mom is awesome, but it´s not quite my thing.
One day while I was doing dental I had a lady come in and ask me to extract all of her teeth except for one. That was twelve teeth in total!!! She was pretty well aged, but I asked her if she was sure and why she wanted them out. She said they hurt her and she didn´t want them anymore. So, I took out eleven teeth, but I couldn´t see anything wrong with the twelfth one so I told her to keep it. lol. That was amazing. This week I also had quite a few five year olds who had teeth that need to be taken out. They were pretty rotted and a few of them couldn´t sleep at night because of the pain. One boy´s face was so swollen that I had to put him on antibiotics and have him come back later in the week. Usually the little ones are very hard to reason with, but all of the young kids I had this week were really brave!!!
All in all this week was amazing. We were swamped with patients, our team was stretched thinner then we thought ever possible, we worked passed sundowm every day for eight days straight, but we survived and had a good time doing it. chau!