Week one in Peru

A week has passed and it has been a whirl wind of an experience. We operated on a kid that was in the earthquake in Chile because he didn´t of insurance in Chile he came to Peru to be operated on. He sliced his foot open and unfortunately didn´t have adequate attention or antibiotics. he came to the ER and we opened his foot and it was filled with pus and necrosed tissue. It smelled horrible and we washed it out. We are waiting for the plastic surgeons to see if there is any saving of his foot. he is oonly 13 years old. His little toe is completely dead and most of the sole of his foot.Yesterday I also had to stitch up a man who is an epileptic and had been drinking. He had a seizure and was brought in. He then had a seizure and fell off his gurney. He split his head open and that is why I had to stitch him up. He then had another seizure as I was trying to put his stitches in. After 20 minutes he was finally stitched up.Also another guy cut his leg with a peice of glass and his calf muscle was sticking out of the wound. As I helped stitch him up, the doc was washing the wound and washed off the blood clot on a major vein. He bleed like crazy about a liter and we finally stitched him up and gave him a compression bandage. We were just happy that it wasn´t an artery.Another surgery was on a 4 yearold kid who thought he was superman and jumped out the window and sliced all of the tendons in his hand. Crazy kidsI was a human ventilator for a man that was run over by a car. Unfortunately the man passed away. It was the first time one of the patients that I cared for passed away and it was a pretty humbling experience as I had to question that if he would have died if he were in the U.S. or a hospital here that had more technology or at least more staff.On a happier note, I went to the movies with a bunch of the med students here. it was some romantic comedy that had the same actors from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was funny how some humor just doesn´t translate as I would laugh and they would have no clue and at parts that were so dumb in my book were so funny to them. It was funny because of the girls had lived in Philidelphia for a year and talked about how she didn´t hang out with people her age because they were so imature and then we went to the arcade to play video games while we waited for our movie to start. Also another funny thing about the culture is how adults love stuffed animals here and cartoon characters. Pretty funny.Hope everyone is happy at home. I took the day off today because I have been working 13 hour days and got sick from food.