The one about clinics

I suppose I haven’t really written much about the actual work that Floating Doctors does when we are on clinics! Usually, I just text people and say, “I’m headed on a multi-day clinic, be back Thursday just in case you start to worry and think I got abducted by aliens.” These multi-day clinics happen twice a month in far-off communities sans cell service, electricity and running water. They are usually where Peace Corps Volunteers live and/or we have a great community contact who leads the planning operations. On Monday morning, all packed and ready with thousands of dollars worth of medicines, equipment, vitamins, and soap, our medical team climbed aboard a huge dugout canoe and sailed three long hours away from our base of operations to a small beach village called Playa Verde. And once we touched down, there begins the three-day roving medical clinic for Ngobe populations.

Last week, over our three-day clinic, we saw almost 250 patients from Playa Verde and the surrounding communities. We see things ranging from your average child with worms, babies with scabies and a woman with heart palpitations who we do an EKG on. Then there’s the gamut of pregnant ladies, from the 9-month pregnant woman with her baby in the breached position (not head first) to the 17-year old who swears she didn’t know she was pregnant (Ngobe version of  the MTV show “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant”). Doctors from all over the world (England, Austria, Denmark, France, Nashville, Canada, Jacksonville) come to provide medical care in these communities for weeks at a time. It’s a pretty fascinating operation we run, full of insanely smart and intense people who all love to teach. So much so that I myself now know how to find the four requirements to bill an ultrasound to insurance in the US: 1) head position, 2) placenta placement 3) fluids in placenta and 4) heartbeat. I’ve learned how to tell when a woman is ovulating, what scabies looks like, how to give a regime to a diabetes patient, the correct medicine to correct high blood pressure, how to take blood sugar levels, measure blood pressure, search for cavities, pull teeth and how to say all this stuff in Spanish. It’s a wide world of medical knowledge out there and I’m soaking it all right up, practically could be a doctor myself!

I’ve been to four multi-day clinics and they are usually an exciting affair. On one, we have to hike four hours up a hill to the middle of nowhere and a community of thirty houses, yet we see over two-hundred patients from the surrounding communities. Another is on the beach overlooking beautiful pristine water and another at the mouth of a river pouring into the ocean. We sleep in hammocks under raised wooden houses and eat rice and beans for three days straight. We poop in latrines that would make my mother gag and bathe in the ocean. I love it. I’ve seen so many wonderful places that many a tourist could only dream of!

I think the Floating Doctors do great work, we bring medical care where there is none, literally. If they have an emergency, good luck. If you’re giving birth, no pain medications and it’s on a wooden floor. Broken foot? Keep going to work. Breached pregnancy? Hope the midwife can turn it around. It’s amazing the amount of medical attention these Ngobes can give with the minimal (non-existent) resources they have. That said, what limited resources we, too, can bring is paramount to their increasing health outcomes. That paired with the Health Promoter Practitioner Course that we are starting to implement (ie. my entire reason for being here!) is going to be critical in these areas. Health care and education is so important I don’t understand why it’s still so hard to access for so many places! Makes me want to be in the global health field forever watching this stuff...but if I did that, who’d run for president in 2036?