Shadowing at the Regional Hospital

On Monday I got to spend a few hours shadowing a relative of Jaquelis who is a gynecologist at the regional hospital in Cusco. Before I left Jaqueli told me that last year, the American staying with them had brought a friend to do the same, and that he had ended up fainting while watching a woman give birth! So, excited as I was to get to follow Jorge around for the afternoon, I was also pretty nervous about how I would react to what I was about to see.

And of course, the first place Jorge took me was the heart- and gut-wrenching scene of a woman having a miscarriage. Her 2-and-a-half-month-old baby had died inside her, and when I arrived on scene the doctor was cleaning her uterus and removing the dead fetus. I had never in my life seen so much blood (besides in my favorite medical shows, of course), nor did I anticipate that the woman would be fully conscious and moaning in the bed above me. Whether it was the rigorous scraping, the amount of blood, or the though of seeing a dead fetus, I felt myself getting dizzy within 5 minutes of entering the room. While I have never fainted in my life, I felt that that day might be my first time, so to avoid creating a scene and an unnecessary distraction for the doctors, I left the room to sit on a bench outside. After a few minutes, one of the nurses came out to bring me a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol to help keep me conscious if I was bordering that line. Jorge came out a bit later, once I was feeling better, and told me we had to go see a patient in an emergency situation. I was a bit embarrassed about my reaction to the miscarriage, so I was eager to follow him to the next adventure waiting. It turned out that the emergency was a pregnant woman needing and appendectomy (as determined by Doctor Jorge), so while it was hard to watch her crying in pain, the lack of blood on the scene of the diagnosis was a million times easier on my nerves.

Before his scheduled Cesarian sections at 4pm, Jorge walked around the hospital with me (and also bought me my favorite candy here, a Sublime, which is basically like a Mr. Goodbar but thicker and ten times more delicious). As we wandered through the hallways (that were much cleaner than those of the little clinic Im working at), Jorge informed me that not only was he a doctor but also an architect and an artist who had studied at the Universidad de Bellas Artes, a very prestigious university in Peru. He proceeded to show me 2 beautiful murals he had painted in the hospital, along with a gorgeous Greek-goddess-esque statue he had made, and then told me that he was currently studying law to get the ball rolling on his 4th career. Needless to say, I was exceptionally impressed and inspired; this man was not only very skilled in each of his professions, but continued to return to school to study and push himself further. I told him this, and like the wise man he is, he returned by saying that the most important vocation, and the hardest, is that of being a parent; no one can teach you how to be one, you must simply learn with practice, instinct, luck, trial, and error.

At 4, Jorge took me to scrub in for the Cesarian and, like in all my fantasies from watching House and Greys Anatomy, I found myself entering an operating room in full green scrubs, with my hair, shoes, and face covered. This time, I was ready for what lay ahead (although the sight of a 15 year old girl giving birth is never something you are really ready for). Standing just a few feet away from the surgery, I was awestruck by what I saw. I was fascinated by how diverse the layers of skin are, and how many were cut through to get to the uterus! Surprisingly, during all the cutting, and didnt actually feel faint at all but was loving every minute of it. I couldnt believe how rough the doctors seemed to be with the human body- they would make a small incision in a layer of skin and then the two of them, one on each side, would pull the skin open to stretch out the opening. When the baby was finally visible, they had to push on the womans upper abdomen while pulling the baby out by its head to get it out. The baby came out with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, and once on a separate table, you could see that something was wrong; his skin was bluish-green, he wasnt crying and was clearly having difficulty breathing. However, after several minutes of removing liquid from his throat and presumably his lungs, he began to breathe regularly and cry. Though I believe the mother may have been conscious (I think she only had an epidural for anesthesia), she was not able to hold her baby even after the surgery because he was taken to another room for immediate attention.

Throughout the entire procedure, I found myself fascinated by what I saw. The placenta, for example, is so much bigger than I had ever imagined; it was so big, in fact, that I thought it was the womans liver at first! I was amazed to see how Jorge expertly sewed up the uterus as it sat outside the womans body, and then moments later even more amazing as he smoothly popped it back inside (as if returning a water balloon to a bucket). The experience absolutely exceeded all my expectations, but didnt particularly make me want to be a doctor. I was, however, most definitely blown out of the water by the whole experience.