birthday hernia

no, i didn't have a hernia (though i easily could have with what my documents-stuffed bag weighs now), but now i know what one looks like! what started out as an expectedly busy day collecting information from the hospital ended with tecnica inviting me to her house for a little surprise birthday celebration. she'd made some cookies and had some cherry cordial and soda laid out for me. her son sang me happy birthday in protuguese and then....she received an emergency call from the hospital! a patient with a hernia was vomiting and the suspicion was that his hernia had become incarcerated (pinched) and needed to be operated immediately. she asked me if i wanted to tag along, and i thought, "what the hell! i can do this!"

she lent me some scrubs, i helped her scrub up (i just poured water while she did the whole handwashing routine) and calmly observed from a corner in the operating room. ok, so i'm lying. i wasn't calm at all. even though the operating room was very nicely air conditioned and cool, i had a cold sweat sitting on my brow for the entire procedure. the first bit was tough for me to watch, but after a while it was so interesting to see it all! she did a great job of explaining it all to me (not easy to do with a mask over your mouth and speaking a language that i really need to concentrate to understand) and pointed out things of interest. i won't gross those of you out there with a weak stomach (like mine), but it was one of the neatest things i have seen. any surgery is probably interesting to everyone at some base level, but to see someone who is very poor, in a lot of pain (i was with her when she did the initial assessment at the ward), out and open on the operating table, and then recovered the next day, walking around, animated and eating, is truly amazing. in these remote places, people like the tecnica are very literally life-savers. that was cool to see.

i also got to watch her do a skin graft of a 17 year-old patient with piomiositis (a disease of the developing world where there is a severe infection of a large group of muscles) and that was equally amazing, for the same reasons. i never thought i'd find the actual witnessing of the operations so interesting (i like cold hard numbers on the computer screen!), but i did. definitely a birthday i'll remember!

the photos are the view of the hospital through her vegetable patch in her backyard.