Stuff

June 20th, 2019 by Bryce Loder

Most of the time here is spent working in the clinic/hospital/ER, washing clothes (change often in this weather) and preparing food for the next day, but there is time to watch geckos on the ceiling at night and have breakfast on a patio outdoors watching parrots in the trees. The outdoors is real; it comes indoors, too.

This is the famous “widowmaker” shower head. When it detects enough water flow over the coils, the heating element turns on. The wiring is so much better than it was on the old ones, and there isn’t a noninsulated “on-off” lever on the wall in most places anymore. And once the temperature was set to lukewarm on Day One, I didn’t touch the controls again. Really nifty gadgets when a second pipe for hot water is not available. Taking the chill off of the water is such a great and luxurious touch.
Geckos on the ceilings sometimes lose their footing and drop onto the table during a meal, but not once has one fallen onto my plate. And they don’t hang around long. They move quickly, so it’s hard to even get a blurry photo.
And on the walls.
Tools to wash and send for sterilization after ingrown toenail removal. That’s one of my favorite procedures since I discovered how much relief I got from yanking out my own (with local anesthesia) several times a few years ago. I love doing this now, knowing that it almost always ends in a happy outcome.
At the little grocery store down the road, there is a new advertisement. There is competition in the neighborhood. 150 Honduran Lempiras/US$6.15 visits (ours are only $4). But Dr. Carlos Romero is just there for a few hours from Friday afternoon to Monday noon. So “emergencies” might have to wait awhile (or they could just go up the road to our ER and be seen when convenient).
If your chest x-ray looks like the one below, you’ll probably want to just walk into my Tuesday morning clinic.
“Big heart”, but not in a good way. People with advanced stages of enlarged heart and cardiomyopathy for various reasons just struggle along until they truly can’t breathe any more, and then they patiently wait for their clinic visit and we put them in the hospital. With maximum medical treatment for heart failure, and minimal blood tests, they do pretty well. I had two of these yesterday, and this was the less serious of the two. Actually, those of us who are a little older are accustomed to treating these people without much in the way of diagnostic testing. Dr. Fredrickson and I did that for years back in the “last century”. And now even here we have some better medication regimens and new knowledge of how to use the old meds, so it’s the best of both worlds.

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