Tuesday, January 3rd
Clinic Chaos. We survived.
Hey everyone! Emma here! The last two days have been a blur. We had clinic at Selian Lutheran hospital yesterday and today. Monday we saw 120 patients and today we saw around 80 patients. Clinic was tough. Our hearts were heavy because we were constantly reminded that we can’t fix everything. We do not have the same resources here as we do in the States. One thing that surprised us the most was the amount of people that sought healthcare too late and now suffer from very preventable conditions that are too complicated to fix now. We also were blown away about the lack of healthcare education that our patients receive. We had a lot of patients that received initial healthcare, but then were never told to receive PT or have any follow up appointments. No one explains to patients how to take their medications. We spent a lot of time educating our patients about the importance of rehab and understanding their healthcare. Another struggle was making the flow of our care efficient. We do not get to view x-rays on the computer. Instead, we viewed x-rays on someone’s phone. There were many other experiences similar to this that made it hard to keep our care fluid.
One thing that we loved was the chapel that we went to on Monday morning. The entire hospital staff gets together to praise God and listen to a sermon to start the day and week. This was really cool for us to see. As students, we loved getting to learn in clinic. Our doctor, Daniel, did a great job of teaching us all about orthopedics and we feel like we learned so much. We learned more about how to communicate with providers, read x-rays, and anticipate what the next steps are for our patients. We also learned a lot about how to assess our patients.
Another thing that we have been doing this week is hospice visits. Hospice visits in Tanzania would be compared to home health in the United States. I went on hospice home visits on Monday and Olivia went today. We both saw a lot of really hard cases that broke our hearts. Life can be really hard here and the poverty is intense. We saw a lot of HIV positive patients and lot of bed ridden patients which was very difficult to see.
We feel like we are emptying the ocean with eye dropper here. We see so many patients here, but we feel like we could be doing so much more. Tonight, we were reminded that God has worked through us to change a lot of lives even if it feels like we have barely scratched the surface. God has opened our hearts and minds and given us the desire to keep pushing forward to leave an impact and shine the light of Christ through providing healthcare. We know that this is not us. It is entirely Him and we feel so grateful to be a part of His work.
