After a week

One week down, and we’ve learned a lot.

Lesson #1: Back pain is a universal complaint. We can give NSAIDs and acetaminophen for the pain, but we can’t take away the farming and harvesting that causes it. We are going to try to find some literature on how to lift things safely (ideally it would be in Spanish, with pictures, as much of our patient population is illiterate). A curious thing to me is that most people say dolor de cintura to describe low back pain (this is most of the back pain), dolor de riñon for pain which is slightly higher, and dolor de espalda for the thoracic spine and up. Cintura is waist, riñon is kidney, and espalda is back. We’ve had at least one patient who was correct when he said that his kidney was hurting him.

Lesson # 2: We’ve seen leishmaniasis – both the cutaneous lesion as well as the protozoa themselves under the microscope.

Lesson #3 takes the form of Intro to Quechua. Fortunately, most of our patients speak Spanish; the Quechua speakers can come in waves, which slows things down, because we only have a few translators. In a lamentable parallel to Spanglish, many of the words sound identical to Spanish and are clearly new additions to the language – but the rest cannot be deduced. We each seem to have picked up a word or so. Nanasunkin is mine (a grammatically incorrect way of asking about pain.)

Lesson #4: logistics. On Saturday we combined tourism with volunteerism and went to Cusco to buy more medicines. We hadn’t brought, for instance, children’s multivitamins or antipyretics, both of which have been in high demand. The pharmacy had no chewable vitamins, but we were able to get the antipyretics. In general, we had considerable trouble finding the medicines we wanted: the pharmacy staff did not appear to be pharmacists. This observation was based on the fact that when we asked if there was anything in the same class as metoprolol and atenolol, the answer was no; we spotted propanolol on the shelves a little while later. There were also no Tums, which we found suspect. (Metoprolol – no; Tums – no; Viagra – yes, lots).

The general clinic flow has gone through a few iterations already and will go through another today: we are balancing the needs of the individual patients, the needs of the community at large, and the educational needs of our students and staff. All in all, it’s been a great week, and we are excited about the rest of our time here!

~Anna