Monday, June 1st

Monday, June 1st

Despite being told that Mondays were usually pretty busy, today was a fairly routine day. We went to breakfast and morning prayer followed by rounds. It’s been a great experience being able to follow patients who have been here since we arrived, and observe how their long-term care is handled. The patients seem to recognize us and feel comfortable with us being there, which makes our time here seem more worthwhile. After rounds Keiko and I sat in the outpatient clinic seeing peds patients with Sanil. We saw a patient with impetigo, a rash caused by strep or staph bacteria that I had only heard of and seen pictures of in my science classes. Just another example of something I had never seen before in the US that isn’t out of the ordinary here. After being here for a few days I’m really starting to feel comfortable interacting with the patients even though I can’t talk directly to them. Sanil let us do a lot of the physical exam components and ask the patients questions while he translated. I think he got a little too confident in us when he left Keiko and I alone in the room to examine whether a teenage girl had a rash on her thighs. Needless to say the language barrier didn’t get us very far on that one, but just like when I was in Haiti it was a humbling experience trying to interact with someone when you can’t speak their language. We saw a few more patients, and then sat with Dr. Clement (probably my favorite physician to work with so far) in his clinic for the rest of the morning. Nothing super out of the ordinary today - a lot of back and knee pain, viral infections, and other typical things you'd see in the US.

We took a break after lunch, and Sanil insisted on googling pictures of Britney Spears to convince us that Christine looks exactly like her (he wasn't very successful). I think our trip would have been very different if it weren’t for Sanil. Since he’s close to our age we’re able to get a good perspective of how life here is so different than in the US. Talking to him has really made me realize how much we take for granted. He always comments on how lucky we are that we can make our own choices as far as what specialty we go into, who we date, when we want to get married or start a family, etc. In India their lives are very planned out for them and they don’t have nearly as many opportunities as we do. But they make the most of their situation which I really admire them for.

Sanil had promised to take us hiking later in the afternoon, but I can’t comment too much on that since Nora and I chickened out and stayed at the bottom after he insisted that there were “snakes and things.” Even without going any higher we could still see how beautiful it was and enjoy the nature that we don’t get to see very often in Chicago. When everyone came back down we took another trip to the Aqua Stop. Apparently we’ve had too much curry and not enough sweets because we loaded up on packaged cookies, ice cream bars, and my new favorite coffee that needs to start being made in the US. The rest of the night was a lot of hanging out, taking showers with lizards, and playing card games, which seems to be our nightly activity for the trip. So today wasn’t extremely patient or medically centered, but I’ve loved being able to have some down time and really get to know everyone here. I'm excited to see how the rest of the week plays out!