Song of the Week

I've been listening to (and watching on DVD, and learning to play songs by) the Beatles a lot recently, so...here's a Beatles song. It's a nice one (not that all aren't).

My First Earthquake

Put that way, it sounds like a children's book. But a scary one! No, just kidding, it wasn't scary. It was just weird, having never before experienced the sensation of the earth shaking. What was weirder, though, is that no one around me (I was sitting with 3-4 people) acknowledged what was going on, they all just kept on chatting like everything was normal (I wanted to shout, "PEOPLE, EVERYTHING'S SHAKING!" but I kept my cool, a.u.). Then after a minute (or maybe after one of them saw my face), one person said, "it's an earthquake," and I said, "huh." (Interestingly, in Spanish a small earthquake is called a temblor, and a large one a terremoto. I tried to explain that English has just one word, and it didn't depend on the magnitude of the shaking. They were perplexed by this.) It lasted for what felt like a while, but was maybe only a minute or so. According to reuters (so it must be true) it was a magnitude 6.1 quake off the Pacific coast. The fun never stops down here...

Happy Columbus Day!

Or, as my dad put it, have a "very happy Columbus Day, with all the joys, responsibilities, fun and solemnities thereto appertaining." I'm celebrating by watching 'La ley y el orden: UVE' (not dubbed, thank goodness) and wasting time online. Not that I had the day off (they don't exactly celebrate Columbus down here). I hope everyone had a good day off! (If you were lucky enough to).

Pics from the weekend

Lake AtitlanSantiago de Atitlan

Lake Atitlan

updates, pics, and whatnot

Hi friends & family,
Hope everyone is doing well up in the chilly(?) northeast. Just wanted to post to check in. No particularly new or exciting things have been happening here. I have a surprise day off, since we were supposed to go away for three days, but something happened with the car (information relayed over the phone in Spanish...never a recipe for thorough understanding) so we're not leaving till tomorrow. So I find myself lounging around the house, playing the guitar, reading the nytimes.com....essentially exactly what I would be doing if I were home. With the exception of going out somewhere, cause I live in a locked, gated community and there's nowhere to go except around the small neighborhood. Which I did (pics included).
Other than that, not too much happening. I've been enjoying the hospital (it's called the Hospital Nacional de Amatitlan), and have been amusing myself by comparing it to American hospitals I've been in. 1, at home you don't have to bring your own toilet paper. 2, our sterile scrubs aren't see-though (literally and seriously). 3, men and women have separate OR changing areas. 4, patients in the ER have some semblance of privacy, and don't have, you know, foleys placed in front of a dozen other people. One similarity: there are drug reps (complete with expensive suits and trinkets to give out).
I've also been keeping up on politics (the debates are shown here in English, and it's in the paper every day) and fighting people about why Obama is better than McCain (somewhat difficult in Spanish). I live in a house of Democrats, but the extended family is Republican (two people actually high-fived about McCain the other night at dinner...and a piece of my soul died), partly because they seem to all be evangelical Christians. Which is a somewhat, uh, interesting situation to find myself in. I was actually in the backseat of the car the other night, and we stopped short, and a Bible came flying off the back shelf and hit me. Maybe God is trying to talk to me.
Take care everyone, and step on some crunchy leaves for me. :)

My street
The world outside the walls

Pictures

Pictures of the beautiful Antigua, Guatemala, a city about 30 min from here.

Day 1 in la emergencia

Ok this has been quite an interesting day. I was supposed to spend part of the day in surgery, but I never ran into a surgeon (nothing is too pre-planned here), so I just spent the day in the emergency room. By 10 am I had seen an arma blanca wound to the buttocks (side note: it was not explained to me what an arma blanca is. It was just stated to me as the mechanism of injury, as if I was supposed to know what it was. I was foiled in googling it because it´s also the name of a Spanish rap group. I finally had to inquire around the house, and it turns out it´s a long piercing knife-like thing. I guess everyone in the ER knows what this is, and people come in with these wounds all the time, like everyone in the UMass ED knows what a switchblade is.), a cockroach-from-the-ear extraction, and two amputated fingers (on the same person). And I seriously got to put my rusty suturing skills to good use today. And every time I sutured I was surrounded by 3-8 students, who I gather were the Guatemalan equivalent of pre-med (they said they were in high school but were wearing matching uniforms...they were probably 17 years old). At one point the (only) doctor said, "I´m going to a meeting. You can finish suturing this cut then sew up that head wound over there?", and before I could process the fact that she had just annouced she was leaving, I was on my own. (HELLO?!? Imagine leaving a fourth-year in charge of the UMass ED. Disaster couldn´t be far behind.) At the time I felt ok, I could definitely suture these people up in a vaguely competent fashion. But of course in short order there were trauma victims coming in, and paramedics (we´ll call them that...I mean the people that bring patients in on stretchers) were telling me about car and motorcycle accidents, and nurses were coming up to me saying, "Doctora, (something in Spanish I barely understood and even if I understood the question I didn´t know the answer)." One of the nurses located the doctor´s stamp, which she had left behind (with her name; it´s what you need to write orders), so I could write xray orders (hey, it takes hardly any Spanish to elicit C-spine tenderness). And of course, everywhere I went there was a gaggle of white-uniformed students following me, who may or may not have been under the impression that I had any idea what was going on. FUN TIMES. Everyone lived though, and everyone eventually stopped bleeding. (i.e. no harm came to anyone, in case there´s some liability lawyer or med school administrator that´s eventually going to read this.) More later. I took some pretty (I hope, I haven´t seen them yet) pictures yesterday that I want to upload. Besos a todos. :)