CentroGrande

On the phone the other day my mom said to me “Rae, you describe your last three months like they were your last three years.” I don’t think I had a very good response. All I could think of was… hmmm, is this good or bad? This week out at the jungle I realized one added detail, I’ve been here FOUR months… and who knows if I remember the last three (in whatever time measurement they be).

I’ve talked about in this blob before how my experience with jungle city medical SUV commercial has been: Do, Complete, Conceptualize, Sleep a lil and Do it all again. Last time I was in the Bolivia I learned my silly sensitive soul got the best of me and is the most of me. I felt as I lived in the States I got used to my select surroundings of picket fences and non-dreaded non- street dogs. When I left on Thanksgiving day last year I was really stoked about road trip hats, wooden boats, Madonna dance parties, the reality of my life cutely paired with my state postliberal arts graduation.

Well folks on day 1 of Marzo 2008 the intensity of profound perceptive “I DO care” hit me again. Maybe its because I live in Bolivia. Maybe its because this time it was someone I really knew. Maybe it’s because I’m not a doctor and nobody is just a patient to me. Maybe it’s because I don’t know medicine but I know pained eyes and tubes and nodules connected to every part of the body. Maybe it’s because I have no idea how to resuscitate but at the end of the day I’m responsible for making sure a really crazy number of hearts are still beating.

I just realized four months have passed. I realized day one the work would never stop. I realized month four I get the same level annoyed with babysitting doctors as I get dealing with bone and body hurting patients and those that ask for a lot a lot a lot of help but then don’t comply when it’s offered.

Zoilo (the father of two of the girls from Palacios that I live with in SCruz mansion) fell off his horse yesterday morning in the campo. He rushed himself to the clinic where it appeared on first look that my favorite man of Palacios had simply broken his nose. He was bleeding like no other but a lil gauze and pressure and fall clean-up and the docs told me he’d be a-ok. I like to trust The Docs but again without medical knowledge, only buddy knowledge, I insisted we take extra care. I had a lil chat with Zoilo while he was all gauzed up and he seemed to be doing well. He was preoccupied about his horse and a lil worried about an intense pain in his chest but other than that still really good people as we say.

Less that 20 minutes later I was rushing him to the hospital. “Rushing” down a rain destroyed mud road a good half hour from the highway which is another half hour away from the nearest hospital. “Rushing” was the blood from his nose and mouth that god damnit why was it in such a hurry? “Rushing” were all the thoughts in my head—acquired medical, non-medical, emotional, physical, you name it. One doesn’t die from a broken nose, right?

I can’t place you in my world. You probably don’t want to be placed in it. Zoilo didn’t die. Even if I transfer him to a Santa Cruz hospital today, the likely hood of him dieing is slim. It hit me this day that all these people, 2 hours from the city, 1 hour from the closest barely functioning hospital, die in emergent situations. There is no other choice. Even if you make it to the hospital you bleed out on the Emergency Room floor by the time you wait for the doctor to 1. pay attention to you 2. write the prescription for the drugs you need which you have to LEAVE the hospital to go and buy 3. get the life or death xray you need (to determine whether you need to go into IMMEDIATE surgery) for which on Saturday you have to wait for Me (or whoever else would normally be me in this situation) to drive down random streets of Portachuello to encounter the house of the WITHOUT A TELEPHONE man that you personally ask to take and hopefully read the xray.

It’s a lot. I’m 22 years old. Four months have passed and I’m still 22. When I focus on the job I think I’m gonna go crazy because that’s what it is. But when I focus on the patients, who have names, and families, and worries and realities connected to their world, their resources, their knowledge, I revert to being emotionally raw (just like the first time I developed in this “developing” world.) It makes me like the job more and be more thankful for what I’m doing. It makes the job that much harder and that much more constant. Doctors get callous. One Doc told me to appropriate medical separation. They see patients. They see medicine. They see life, and death when their skills can’t save it. Another Doc told me that when I start seeing the same, it’s my time to leave.

It’s been 4 months. My self-proclaimed “I NEED a one week vacation” starts as soon as I post this Blob and go and buy my ticket to Cochabamba.