So we just finished a week of school and clinics. On Tuesday we went to Kapri which is the farthest location of all of the clinics we do. As well as being the farthest away, Kapri is also the most remote and our original plan was to take the deuce as far as it could go and then hike from there. Kapri is about 3 miles from another town called Miguel Bikan which has an ok road by Nicaraguan standards. From there the road quickly becomes merely a line through the jungle that happens to be without trees and is barely wide enough for the deuce to drive through. Since everyone rides in the back we were at the mercy of all the random branches and thorns that reached out of the jungle. My hands got pretty scraped up in the process but surprisingly we actually made it the whole way without having to hike.
I was with the doctor for that clinic and we saw a couple of interesting things; our first patient had stepped on a nail a couple of weeks before and was worried about infection. We washed the bottom of his foot with iodine and then the doctor decided that we needed to check if there was any pus in the wound. To do this he had me numb up the area with a lidocaine injection and squeeze the wound to try and express any pus that might be there. Even though the patient was warned he still jumped and struggled and I was a little worried about poking myself with a dirty needle. We eventually got him calmed down and were able to check the wound which proved to be healing nicely and not infected. Our next patient was a lot older and appeared to have some kind of chronic wasting syndrome; his cheeks were really sunken and ribs were very prominent. When he removed his shirt there was an approximately 3 inch wide raised mass just below his left shoulder which he said had been there for about 1 year. The patient also had a large weeping lesion covering most of his left ear that looked like it could have been a type of skin cancer, possibly basal cell carcinoma according to the doctor. We cleaned the patients ear and told him that he needed to try and get to Waspam to get the mass on his back looked at by a surgeon.
Most of the other patients complained of a lot of the same symptoms. Almost everyone says they have a fever even though their temperatures don't reflect it at all. A lot of people also complain about having a fever only at night also. I don't know where they get the idea that they have these symptoms since their vital signs definitely don't check out, maybe someone told them one time that they had a fever and they assume that they always have one. A lot of the time I think it comes down to ignorance about health; every other person who comes in complains of being dizzy and getting head aches but when you ask them about how much water they drink its only one or two glasses. I think they believe that all they have to do is go see the white people get a few pills and whatever they have will go away. I don't know how these people will ever improve their lives unless someone really teaches them how to be healthy, that would be a worthy mission.
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