We held our third medical camp in a dirty, poorly lit 10x10 ft. social club. We had to put two tables outside under a tent because of limited space. A border patrol campus was directly behind us. One guard stared at us from his tower on the other side of the wall.
I worked with a new doctor and thoroughly enjoyed his help. He maintained a sense of humor, gave me the opportunity to perform as complete of an exam as I wanted, and explained what he was diagnosing and why he prescribed what he did. Our first few patients were particularly interesting. The first woman had been diagnosed with scabies the day before but couldn’t afford her medication. It’s absolutely satisfying to pay for medications for a patient that you believe will follow through with the treatment. Unfortunately, we can’t apply treatment to her bed, so the scabies will probably come right back. The second patient was a very young child with protein calorie malnutrition, represented by severe edema in his stomach and feet. The third patient had a tumor in her neck and a tumor in her cheek. A past blood test on a tumor in her arm supposedly revealed that it was benign, but the other tumors had not been checked. The doctor I was working with recommended to the camp administrators that we pay for biopsies. She was told to come back in thirty minutes, but apparently she never returned. That was my first ever patient with tumors, and I have no idea what happened to her. Another man probably still had TB after he quit his medication eight months early. He said that everyone in his family died of TB a few years earlier.
No comments:
Post a Comment