This morning we did yoga on the rooftop of our building. It was beautiful. Our internet has been out for a while but honestly, it’s been perfect. It is so nice to feel disconnected from the world and lost in the work over here. Our group has become really close too. Instead of updating our blogs and facebooks we’ve had a few dance parties and pole hugging contests. I’ve never laughed so much in my life. This group is hilarious.
Today we went to a colony to do medical work. I was really impressed with the system. The program visits each colony once or twice a week. Rising Star has a van full of medical supplies and fold-up tables/chairs. Before you know it, there is a little clinic set up in the middle of nowhere in a colony. Each patient has a chart and they “check in”, then receive their medications for leprosy (and healthcare in general). Then there is an assembly line where the volunteers remove their bandages, wash their feet, and massage the wounds with an oily ointment. I was on debridement where we removed the dead, necrotic tissues on the patient’s sores.
The nurse I was paired with did most of the cutting and I reapplied the bandages. I don’t know which was more unnerving- watching the patient cringe in pain or hardly noticing his numb skin being cut off. It was a really heart wrenching experience. I have shadowed wound care in the US for clinicals and it really tore at my heart comparing the difference. In the US, the procedure is all about sterility and pain reduction. There are all these gadgets engineered to aid the process. Here in India, we were in a dirty room, in the open air, and using the most basic of medicine. My emotions were torn between being thrilled that these beautiful people were receiving health care or being heartbroken that we couldn’t do more. Most of the patients were missing multiple fingers and toes, and had wounds so deep you could see the muscle. It was tough to see them walking around with their simple bandages in the dirty streets, but it was amazing watching the interactions of their little community. Each person supported the next. If one patient had wounds on his hands, he would be helping the other patient walk that had wounds on their feet. As I was applying bandages, the men would linger by and correct me if I needed to do something different for their friend’s specific sore. They were all each other’s advocates and formed this beautiful little family. I'm really looking forward to the next medical rotation and all the experiences to come. It is so bizarre because technically I've been here for only four days, but it feels like it's been weeks- in a good way :)
No comments:
Post a Comment