Clinic Day 4

---

This morning I woke up before my alarm (again), but wasn’t overly exhausted so I got ready and headed down for breakfast early. My stomach is still feeling off but I ate breakfast anyways; fruit (papaya, watermelon), tortillas, plantains, little bit of beans, and chamomile tea. I could live off of fruit, tortillas, plantains and tea. Slowly everyone made it down to breakfast and then we got onto the bus and headed to our last clinic day in San Jorge La Laguna. Today we didn’t get any super interesting cases but the group I was in saw 13 patients throughout the day which is awesome; we also got the diagnosis completely right on 4 patients!! Is anyone sick? Don’t worry, I’m almost a doctor, I’ve got this 😉 At lunch I decided to venture out and eat the burger looking meat patty, vegetables, and tortillas. I figured I need some sort of protein and if my stomach was going to go rouge I’d rather have it when I’m surround by doctors. Okay actually I’d rather none of that happen but hey, it’s a silver lining? After lunch Amanda and I went outside for a little walk when we came across some kids and we decided to play futbol (soccer). The dirt field we were playing on was nice and big so I managed to not hit anyone in the face! I get extra points for that right?! One of the kids that were playing with us was amazing; I was extremely jealous but didn’t mind playing street futbol with him because he was so good that when push came to shove, literally, neither one of us minded. It was so hot outside today and with all the running the kids had us doing up and down the court I was drenched in sweat… It was a lovely look. It took us a while but finally we noticed that everyone else on the medical team were back inside. We said goodbye to the kids and headed back to the clinic. Of course when we got back to the clinic there were no patients so we had some time still. Before we got any more patients I made my way over to the washroom by the dentist’s workroom. The washroom was tucked around the back from the room; it was fairly dark with the only light being the light that crept in from the space between the wall and the tin roof. I closed the door and tried to squat over the toilet; there was no toilet seat so it was all that more important to squat. I’m not opposed to squatting but trying to squat in a narrow and small room while holding your pants away to make sure you don’t pee on them is extremely difficult. I decided to try a different approach, one that I had learned while camping; I held onto the small metal door handle and leaned back. This approach seemed to work better than my previous attempt. As I opened the door and went back out into the light I checked myself just in case. And of course when I went to check I had an oh-so-lovely spot on the back on my scrub pants where had peed on myself. So classy. I hiked up my pants and pulled down my shirt so that my shirt would overlap my pants and cover the spot as I walk back to the medical room. We had a couple more patients before we had a group talk and loaded all the supplies back onto the bus. On our way back to the hotel Danny invited all the volunteers to go out to dinner to this great pupusa place up the street from the hotel. The majority of the volunteers decided to go out for pupusa’s so when we got back to the hotel we wrote down what we all wanted to make it easier for the restaurant since it was a small mom n’ pop place. It was my first time eating pupusa’s and it won’t be my last! They were so good. A pupusa could be described as a thick tortilla stuffed with cheese and whatever else! I had a spinach pupusa and a mushroom pupusa. The spinach one was definitely my favorite. After we were done filling up on pupusa’s I went back to the hotel with a few other volunteers. We were all going out tonight since tomorrow we didn’t have clinic so I changed my shirt and went to change my shoes. I was looking forward to wearing my flip flops but when I pulled them out of my suitcase I realized that I had packed two right feet instead of one complete pair … tennis shoes it is! Shannon and two other volunteers hung out for a little bit in our room until we eventually we crammed into one of the other volunteers’ room because everyone wanted to predrink. By 9:30 we were heading out of the hotel to go Panarock –which was an exact replica of Hardrock café. A couple of us were trying to see if anyone else wanted to go to a nightclub nearby because earlier there had been a few that wanted to go out dancing. After a few more drinks everyone headed down to the nightclub but before we made it to the club, everyone got sidetracked by a different bar so we ended up at this bar that was putting on karaoke. While I wasn’t drunk enough to enjoy the night like everyone else was – scratch that, I didn’t have a drop of alcohol –I still had some fun and even got to sing two karaoke songs: Matalas and Atrevete te te. We were going to go to the nightclub after karaoke but by the time everyone was ready to head out the club had already closed. Myself and two others were ready to head back so we walked back to the hotel and after washing my face and brushing my teeth I’m ready for bed!

---