Recovering

Buenas tardes!

Sorry it’s been a while since my last post- I got sick! Not really bad sick, just like a fever/cold/laryngitis/lay in bed a couple days type of thing. So I missed Friday at the hospital. Going back tomorrow. This weekend has been a bit of a bust- just laying around in my room blowing my nose, not so awesome. However, I am really glad that I put up the extra 50 bucks a month for air conditioning!

The rest of the week at the hospital continued to be quite the experience. I was in the infectious disease room, and I will be moving to the intermediate care nursery tomorrow. Major perk of the intermediate care nursery- air conditioned! (Leon is known for being on of the hottest cities in Nicaragua).

They are letting me ease into this inpatient experience slowly, thankfully. I observed the signout on Wednesday afternoon when the resident on started his call. In the whole hospital overnight, there are 4 Peds people, two residents in the ED, and one resident and one attending upstairs. So the upstairs resident is in charge of: the respiratory room (20 patients), the diarrhea room (12 patients), the post-operative room (10 patients), the ID room (3 patients), the Pediatric ICU (9 patients), the Neonatal ICU (8 patients), the intermediate care nursery (13 patients), and any deliveries (5 women in labor). Plus any and all admissions. Whew. Such a mix of ages and acuities, and no intern to scut out !! All sign out is verbal only and very fast. Definitely a change from our system. Residents here change rotations every 2 months- but only from one room to another. That’s right- they are inpatient and on q4 call for 3 years straight. No outpatient rotations. Again, I will try to remember this whenever I am tempted to whine about my residency schedule….

So that’s enough of the nitty gritty. In other news, I am enjoying my tae kwon do as well as now my latin dancing classes (tues and thurs at the community center). I rallied enough energy to go to a movie last night (Date Night with Tina Fey and Steve Carroll)- movies cost $2.50!!! I met up with Dra Gutierrez (the doc I worked with in El Sauce) and some of her friends, and we went out for a bit afterwards (I pooped out pretty early, especially since bars and restaurants here are full of smokers).

Something funny about Nicaragua- people see each other on the street here and say “Adios!” instead of hello. I asked someone why, and they said that if they really aren’t going to stop and chat it isn’t appropriate to say hello, which in a way I guess makes sense… Of course, if your face screams “gringa”, as mine does, instead of “adios” you get random people saying “good bye” to you all the time. Or, if they had poor English instruction, something that sounds very much like “goose boy.” I try not to take that personally.

Well, now feeling better and looking forward to working with the tiniest munchkins next week!
Hasta pronto
- Dra MV

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