|
jo Thompson
True Blue Farmgirl
603 Posts
Jo
the mountainside of the Chugach
in Alaska
USA
603 Posts |
 Posted - Dec 13 2007 : 3:25:19 PM
|
Hello again! I'm home! After 40 hours of waiting in airports and flying, I arrived home to a frigid landscape, brrrr. My suntan will probably last until christmas, along with the smiles of some incredible people.....
I'm going to share one story from my trip with you....
We held a clinic the first day in Piura Peru, it is in the very northern part of Peru in a desolate landscape around 120 km from the coastline. There were nearly 200 people waiting for us that morning outside of the small local hospital called "El Salud". Late in the afternoon after we had screened nearly 100 children with cleft lips and palates, we began screening some of the burn patients. In our country burns are addressed quickly and reconstruction is began immediately.
One of the other recovery nurses and I wandered into the crowd of people making contact and visiting with different families. I noticed a woman sitting in the back with a partial sheet shielding her head and face from any prying eyes and immediately walked over to her and touched her hand. She told me her name was "Fany" and she had burned badly two weeks prior. In our country she would have been in a medical unit where she would be having debridement and care. Under the sheet was oozing, tortured looking flesh. She was barely able to open her left eye. I told her we would help her......
We operated on her on a Wednesday and a week later this is her photo. We offered her a mirror hesitantly, but she was overjoyed! I will be beautiful again someday she offered. She was beautiful to me now. Before she had been so silent and now she hardly stopped talking.
Fany was my christmas gift............. jo
myself on the left, my friend Mairlyn, pacu nurse and Mary, our translator
"life is drab without a lab"
http://web.mac.com/thomja/ |
|
A few pics and notes about Peru
