![\"hankins\"](\"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/53\/2015\/12\/hankins.jpg\")
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Hey again!\u00a0This will be the last update from me before I head out into the real bush, the swamps\/jungles of the Gulf province of PNG. We are taking a team out \u201con patrol\u201d as they call it to visit a few villages up the river. Kapuna hospital does this once every month or two in order to reach people that live too far to come to the hospital for basic health care. I think we\u2019ll probably be treating a lot of malaria, diarrheal illnesses, giving vaccines and doing check-ups for children and pregnant women. Our team is made of\u00a0Manar and I, who will function as the two doctors, three nurses and one or two nursing students. Seeing as how we\u2019re only taking one of our wood-bottomed boats (supposed to hold eight people and all our supplies) I\u2019m a little nervous we\u2019ll be bailing a lot of water out of the bottom. I\u2019m pretty sure we\u2019re exceeding whatever weight limit it has. It\u2019s exciting though because it will give me a chance to see (and live) how most PNGians live. I\u2019ll pretend I\u2019m on Survivor. Right now we\u2019re supposed to be back on Friday but that could always change.<\/p>\n
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We had a nice relaxing weekend and didn\u2019t spend as much time in the hospital. Saturday afternoon the girls had a volleyball game using a net hung between two bamboo poles. They\u2019re much better than I am\u2026although I had a whole audience of locals and patients laughing at me when I missed a serve at the beginning of the game. After I got warmed up, though, I did okay.:)<\/p>\n
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We were also lucky to have a woman named Debbie stay with us over the weekend. She\u2019s a mission worker from New Zealand who works with her husband down the river doing Bible translation, and is probably the most talkative person I\u2019ve ever met. Since she\u2019s been in the country on and off for about twenty years, she was able to share a lot of stories about her work and about the culture of PNG in general with us. It\u2019s great to be able to learn from the lives of so many people I\u2019ve met on this trip so far. She also loves to cook so I didn\u2019t have to do a thing involving the stove all weekend.\u00a0She\u2019s coming back in a week, so I told her that she could stay for as long as she wanted!<\/p>\n
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Today I finally got to see and manage my own patients on hospital rounds, which was nice now that I\u2019ve started to figure out how this tropical medicine works. We treat a whole lot of patients for malaria, but we treat based on their fever pattern and a few other signs and symptoms, not based on a diagnostic test. Because of this, it seems like there\u2019s a lot more malaria than there probably actually is, but since chloroquine is plentiful and cheap we go ahead and treat all of these patients anyway. I\u2019ve gotten to do a lot of dressing changes and we drained an abscess in an infected\u00a0hand yesterday\u2026but of course I\u2019m still waiting for more babies to be born! We had a short little education session for all the new moms today which was kind of cool, and talked to them about breastfeeding, when to introduce new foods, and hygiene. We also give all of the new moms books for their baby which contain a vaccination chart, doctor\u2019s note section, and growth curves to keep a record of weight and height. You\u2019d think that these would be lost or ruined in most households, but it\u2019s amazing to me how many parents bring these books with even their teenagers to the\u00a0hospital\u2026there\u2019s really much more well-child health than I was expecting!<\/p>\n
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Being here a week I\u2019ve really gotten to see how God has been working in the healing of a lot of patients. We had a couple of children in particular last week who were so dehydrated and not able to wake up and drink that I thought they probably wouldn\u2019t make it. Over the weekend one recovered enough to be sent home today and the other one was awake and eating. I thought that was pretty cool considering we don\u2019t even have IV hydration supplies at the moment. It just goes to show that prayer and God\u2019s healing are very present and powerful here with our really limited resources.<\/p>\n
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Well I\u2019m off to head to the market to see if they have anything interesting to buy. They mainly just sell food, but it\u2019s really cheap so I like going to look around. You can buy a huge bunch of greens for about 10 cents, and a whole crab for the equivalent 30 cents! Unfortunately I can\u2019t recognize most of what\u2019s for sale and so I usually stick to the basics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey again!\u00a0This will be the last update from me before I head out into the real bush, the swamps\/jungles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inmedblogs.us\/kellyhankins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}