Abby Becomes a Nurse for a Day (or, Nicaragua, Day Seven)

On Wednesday, I was finally able to do what I came here to do: observe surgery!

I went over to the hospital in the late morning with Lauren, Crista, and Emma. We changed into scrubs and our hospital shoes (which are NEVER worn outside) and went to hang out in the pre-op room. There wasn't much to do there, but after about fifteen minutes, Deb came in and took us into surgery.

The first surgery I saw was a young boy who had only about 90 degrees of movement in his left elbow. The objective of the surgery was to give him a few more degrees of extension, and then also to make it possible for him to rotate his forearm. The doctor who did the surgery was not able to do as much as he wished, but by the end of the procedure, the boy could extend his arm 25 or 30 degrees more than before, and he had complete freedom of rotation. It is also possible that as he stretches his muscle more and more, he will gain a little bit more extension.

The second surgery was on a woman's wrist. She had broken her wrist years ago and it had healed so the hand was not straight on the wrist, but up and off to the left a little. (To get a better idea of what I mean by this, look at the pictures below). To fix this, the wrist has to be re-broken on the fracture, and a bone graft has to be taken from the hip and inserted into the space where the break was. Then a plate has to be screwed into the bone to hold the graft in place. We had to take two grafts for this one, because the first one we took was too small, and though it was helping to correct the wrist, it wasn't quite worth the surgery. So, instead of just doing an okay job, the doctor decided to take a bigger graft. The second one he took was too big, but he was able to whittle it down to the right size.

Setting up for the wrist surgery

The wrist

The x-ray of the wrist

Crista, Lauren and I looking official by the monitors

After we finished in the hospital, we went back to the house, ate dinner and then headed out to Saul's, one of the local sports bars and restaurant, to watch the San Francisco/Philadelphia game. Once we had all arrived, we took up about half the restaurant. It is a little sad: When a big group of us spend the evening there, Saul makes as much in a night as he would normally make in a week. It is incredible, but the restaurants and shops that we gringos visit really do much better than the other establishments. Tourists are so very important to the people here.