Assessing a pregnant woman in the clinic.
Today was clinic day again and this time it was Santa Clara, a town about 6 km down the road from Francia. My first impression of Santa Clara was that it was a lot cleaner and better laid out than Franca, I couldn't really put my finger on one specific thing though. We passed one very nice house by miskito standards, I asked around and I later found it belonged to the priest of the local catholic church…go figure. We set up the clinic in the local school with the pharmacy in one class room and 3 examination stations in the classroom next door. Outside we set up a triage station and vitals and a waiting area, the patients were given numbers and waited till an examination station opened up. The stations were staffed by Jeff, Dr. Linares and Maria, the doctor's wife who is also an RN. I was with Maria and we mostly saw the simpler stuff like coughs and diarrhea. Almost everyone here has some kind of parasite so we prescribed a lot of anti-parasitics like metronidazol and mebendazol for ascariasis and amebiasis. Instead of seeing one patient at a time it was more like seeing one family at a time; mom, dad and three little distended stomach kids. A lot of people complained of fever too so it seemed like we were giving acetaminophen out like candy too. I did have some time to catch a few things from the doc like how to examine the abdomen of a pregnant woman to determine if the baby was in the correct position for delivery. We also saw a man who had an odd sore just above his knee, it was soft like an abscess instead it was hard. Although the cases I saw were pretty average it was a good learning experience and helped to figure out what to know for next time. I definitely have to get some basic drugs and dosages memorized so I don't have to keep looking stuff up every five minutes.
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