Today was our first day at the hospital! It was so good, but started off with a few problems... We left our house at 6:00 to take the bus and get there by 7. However, when we got to our first stop (parada de la U), we waited and waited for the bus. Normally we go to that stop and take Periferico, but today we were looking for bus 96. Literally ALL of the buses were Periferico. We waited for an hour, used a pay phone to call CASAS (with no luck), and finally took Periferico to CASAS. We waited for Lucy to get to work and she ended up driving us to the hospital, so we got there around 8:30. We were worried that the doctor would be mad, because Lucy has really emphasized the need for us to make a good impression, but he was surprisingly nice and laid back. He´s in his 30s, I´d say, and speaks English well.
He showed us around the floor and introduced us to a lot of the nurses. The hospital is called UNICAR and is relatively small. I´m not sure if it´s primarily cardiology, but our floor is pediatric cardiology intensive care. It was a big room with 6 beds and 6 nurses. Today there were only 3 patients in there, and 2 were in surgery most of the day. The patient Steph and I were working with was a little girl who actually turned 1 today. She has Down´s Syndrome and a plethera of cardiology problems- VSD, patent ductus arteriosus, left ventricular insufficiency, and resultant pulmonary hypertension and hepatomegaly. She was recieving mechanical ventilation, had a triple lumen central line, double lumen arterial line, and was recieving peritoneal dialysis. The doctor said they want to get her into surgery but have not been able to yet due to her condition. Extremely sad. Her mom stopped in for a couple minutes this morning, which I´m sure was even harder since it was her birthday. Stephanie and I did some charting, I&Os, and the peritoneal dialysis exchanges.
The hospital had extremely nice cardiac monitors and other equipment. I think most of it was donated.. there were plaques up recognizing donations from McDonald´s and other businesses. Our nurse was super helpful, and we did our best to understand her Spanish. Most of the names of medications and things are really similar to English, so that wasn´t too hard. The nurse said that they don´t send nurses home when there is a low patient census, so even though there were only 3 patients today, all 6 nurses were still there. The doctor said that only 1 nurse on that floor is actually a RN. The others have less training, maybe like LPNs, I suppose. CASAS had originally said we would be there 3 days a week, but somewhere along the line it was changed to 5 days a week. We asked the doctor what he expected and he said that it´s up to us.. so I think we are only going to go Mon, Wed, and Fri. We´re still having class every day until 5, so that will give us more time to study Spanish and we won´t have to go to bed so early all the time.
We took the bus to CASAS after and got there around 1:00. We had class from 2:00-5:00, with a new teacher named Veronica. She was really friendly and explained the grammar things well, which was helpful but also a little more intimidating than Marta.
Alright, this is long enough and I should get ready for bed! Buenas noches!
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