Day 17 - Mon, Jun 23, 2025

Today there wasn't a ton of excitement, except ...

It was just me and one nurse in the ER today, and at some point she said "I'll be back in a while."  So literally for like an hour and a half I was in the ER by myself. Which isn't a huge deal because there's only four beds, but it's kind of a huge deal when I'm mixing meds and putting in IV's when I'm not really familiar with their medications or wtf I'm doing, if I want to get specific.  At one point all four beds were full, and I was running back and forth  and acting all doctor like.  But at least I didn't kill anyone... Yet.

The funny thing is my local friend told me last night that everyone in town knows who I am, the gringo doctor.  And when they come to the clinic they try to get me. 😳. I think for the most part it's only because I have some empathy and spend some time with them, and the other doctors seriously just kind of yell at them.  "I told you to take antibiotics for a week and you only took them for 3 days, do you want to die?" I've heard that more than once.

I did have an older woman with chest pain, that I was kind of worried about because there's no actual equipment in this clinic.  So I literally put my whoop on her wrist and did a half-assed ECG to make sure she wasn't going to die on my watch.  I gave her some versed and let her lie there for an hour until her BP actually went down to normal.

The one kind of cool thing is a doctor brought back a kid who had two pins in his arm. And by pins I would say they looked like a foot long piece of coat hanger, sticking out about an inch from the back of his hand and bent at a 45 with a pair of pliers.  I guess it was the day to take them out, and the doctor literally had a pair of pliers and was twisting the wires loose and pulling as hard as he could.  At some point they popped and he slid it straight out, and the kid was more or less good as new.  Totally interesting to watch. 

The other thing that happened is I decided to go to the dentist 😳.  I have a cavity on one of my teeth, and my dentist said it was too close to the gum line so they would have to do a crown, as in $750 later.  So I went to a dentist here that was recommended to me, and he seriously was an artist.  It took him about a half hour to fill the cavity, but he didn't use any pain meds and for the most part it didn't hurt.  He had quite the soft touch.  And it was 80 sol,  which is around $20, which is less than my co-pay at home.  I told him that I thought he was awesome and if there was any other work he thought I needed to go ahead and do it, so he actually put two Peruvian crowns on teeth he said we're getting dark.  He worked on me for 2 and 1/2 hours at 8:00 p.m., and the final cost was 200 sol, or roughly $60.  Also no novacaine.  And you can't even tell what teeth he worked on...

patient getting an infusion

patient with chest pain 😳

kid with the hangar in his arm

my next door neighbor has a nice cock

my new dentist 😳