Friday March 22^nd

Today was out final day at the clinic.  In the morning, I worked with Dr. Bzdega, the pediatrician.  I helped her to calculate doses for the children’s medications.  I am now a pro at figuring out Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and Amoxicillin doses in children.  I was difficult to be exact with the doses, because many times we were not handing out dosing syringes with the medications so we had to round to the nearest half of teaspoon.  Since they don’t have a measuring device with the liquid medication, they will most likely be using a household teaspoon, which goes against everything we just learned about pediatric doing from Dr. Bell in class!  Using a kitchen teaspoon could easily under dose or overdose the child.  Aside from calculating doses for the children, I got to witness the process of taking a patient history and review of systems to gather the knowledge needed to diagnose a patient.  I saw a small girl with head lice and was able to recommend a medication to treat this condition.  Of course my head started itching after she left and we all went straight for the hand sanitizer!  A baby that had visited us on the first day of the clinic, came back today since the mom didn’t think he was getting better and his fever was getting higher.  We decided to treat the baby with high dose amoxicillin for otitis media.  I was glad to see that Dr. Bzdega didn’t initially prescribe the antibiotic and told the mother to follow up if the baby wasn’t getting better because earlier in the year we learned about antibiotic resistance and how to prevent resistance.  Another little boy we saw was pretty dehydrated and Dr. Bzdega gave the mother tips on how to prevent dehydration and gave them oral re-hydration salts.  The mother was so thankful for the help we offered her in the five minutes we talked with them that she gave Dr. Bzdega, the medical student, translator, and me a big hug before leaving.  It’s moments like this that I realize that we really do make a difference by coming here on this brigade. 

During the afternoon I was in the pharmacy again.  It was frustrating because we were running out of a lot of the medication since it was our last day.  We had to make many substitutions because of this.  I liked being able to use my professional and clinical knowledge to substitute the medications.  It was a lot easier than in the states, because when we need to substitute something, we have to get ahold of the doctor’s office (which is almost impossible!) before we can make the change. 

We got out of the clinic a little early today.  Around 2:00pm, there weren’t many patients left in line, which I thought was strange because on all of the other days there were always people in line until later in the afternoon.  After talking to some of the younger boys from the community, we discovered that no one was left at the clinic because they were all watching the soccer game.  Honduras was playing Mexico in a World Cup qualifying game.  Apparently this is comparable to the Iowa/Iowa State football game in Iowa!!  I think that the game ended in a tie…don’t ask me how that works if it is a qualifying game.  Could you imagine if the final four ended in a tie??

Tonight after dinner we had a group meeting so everyone could share their favorite parts of the trip and what they learned being here.  It was fun to hear what everyone had to say.  I liked hearing the praise the physicians and med students gave the pharmacy team! It was rewarding to hear that!  I also really enjoyed what our security guard had to say to us.  He was so cute and I had a crush on him the whole week!  He took his job very serious and kept us safe and made sure we made it back safe and sound to our families and friends back home.  He wanted everyone to know that he and all of the other police officers take their job very serious and are working hard to crack down on the crime in Honduras so that people aren’t scared to come here and so more people will travel to Honduras. 

After our group meeting, we had a fiesta.  The locals from Honduras put on a traditional Hondur

an show for us.  It was very interesting to say the least.  After the show we all danced and partied to celebrate a successful trip!