Relearning Creole, Trigger Finger, & Unexpected Guests

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Thursdays are well baby checkup days, and Laura got to help out with that while I shadowed Rodney today. Since most patients that came today are healthy babies, things were a bit slow in Rodney's office. Whenever patient flow stopped, I went over to the optometry to see if they needed help translating or hung out with Julie (Irish physical therapist), who was also having a slow day and helped out with translation at the optometry as well.

I'm glad that my Creole is slowly coming back to me. Sometimes I just have to think of a word for a few seconds and it will pop up, but sometimes I just won't know what to say. Still the biggest challenge is hearing comprehension. People speak so fast that I often can't distinguish one word from another. Near the end of the day at the clinic, I played with some of the little boys that hang around everyday. It's a lot easier to talk with kids because they speak slower and with simpler phrases. That's one of the ways I learned Creole last year, talking with the orphans a lot. I heard I can get Creole lessons, so I'm looking forward to that.

One of the patients we saw today was an old man who had a surgery on the palm of his right hand because he accidentally cut straight across it. Since the surgery, he hasn't been able to move much of the fingers on his right hand, and the ring finger is stuck in contracted position. Julie called it the "trigger finger" because they were all extended straight (except the ring finger). I did a few muscle tests that I learned from ICM (Intro to Clinical Medicine) last quarter, and figured that he was weaker at extending his fingers than contracting them at the knuckles, but couldn't bend any of the joints on his fingers. In any case there wasn't much we could do for him.

At the end of the day, Gavin talked to me about doing a hypertension screening at the next mobile clinic, which will be on Saturday the 28th. I'm excited to do this because a part of my original plan for coming to Haiti was to do a hypertension screening and gather blood pressures 3 and 6 months postpartum. Since we'll be going up in the mountains, it would be interesting to compare prevalence of hypertension there and here near a major city.

A missionary couple, Matt and Stacey, who has been here since last year was suppose to fly back home today, but there was a problem with the plane, so they ended up coming back with the hopes to fly tomorrow morning. At the airport, they met a group of short-term missionaries from Ohio who were scheduled for the same flight but had nowhere to go, so they came to OMS compound to stay the night. It really was a good thing they met Matt and Stacey at the airport.

Apparently this Saturday we'll be going to the beach! Last year in Haiti, while I lived here for 4 months, I got to go to the beach 2 times, once during the first week with the medical team, and second time on the day before I left Haiti. Since the clinic isn't open on Saturdays, I guess we'll have some time to play a bit, except next Saturday is mobile clinic, which is even more exciting.