June 27th
Today I was in the same hospital but in a different area. I was in the Intensive Care Unit. I couldn't do much that day because they are very afraid of spreading nosocomial infections. Even the family members are only allowed to visit the patient for 15 minutes. I mainly just observed from afar and asked the doctor questions about the patients and their plan with them. I talked to this doctor today and he was talking about how he went to the movies and I asked him if there was one in this area. He told us that there is one in this area and that they play english movies! So now the plan on Thursday is our farewell dinner at "Memories" and then going to the movies to see Snow White and the Huntsman :) Today was our last day of clinical and we completed our 90 hour requirement! All in all I have had a very humbling and amazing experience here in Panama and I think I will always remember just how thankful I am to be living in the United States. I was sad that I didn't get to see any live births or even be with any children in the hospital but I guess that is what next semester is for! I am anxiously awaiting my pediatrics and women's health rotation now :) I enjoyed my time at Nutra Hogar and going to the different elementary schools and giving tooth brushes and tooth paste to the children. My favorite experience in the clinicnals so far was giving the shoes to the children of Las Minas. Some children have to walk an hour and a half to school and they don't even have proper shoes or their shoes are very worn out. So it was a very awesome experience being able to give them the shoes. The hospital was very similar to the hospital in the United States other than the fact that they don't use gloves when they do IV's and stuff like that. I learned today that well paid nurses here only make $750 a month! Also a resident doctor I talked to told me he only made $30/day. On the other side of the spectrum that same doctor only had to pay $55/semester for his schooling so I guess that makes sense. However, either way I am feeling very blessed to go back to my country where nurses make more money and where we are blessed with a better education system. The children really touched my heart on this trip because they go without so many things in their lives and have been through so many things that I can't even fathom. I feel like we did some very awesome things here in Panama during our clinical experiences and even though it was different than I expected, I still am going to take away so much from this trip. Now that we are done with the clinicals, the plan an for thursday is to finally sleep in (past 6am!) cook French Toast and clean the house before we leave. We also will be working on laundry and packing up. We will present our group projects at 1pm and then after that the dinner and a movie plans. On Friday we leave Chitre at 10 am and head back to City of Knowledge. The bus ride is about 4 hours but once we arrive in City of Knowledge we will just be laying low and going out to dinner for our last meal together. After that we will head out for our flight at 12pm because our flight is at 3pm! I will be landing in Tampa at 11:20pm and Ryan is meeting me there! Although I have had a great experience here I am definitely ready to be home with Ryan and my friends and my family :)
Talk to you all soon.
