Mending Bodies and Healing Hearts

It has been a week and a half since hell broke loose in Honduras. With there being no end in sight, it has felt like an eternity. This beautiful country with its palm trees, beaches, jungles, and mountains is in such great turmoil.  a protest blocking a road in La Ceiba It all started with the elections on Sunday November the 27th. The two most popular candidates are the current president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, running for a second term (the nationalists) and Salvador Nasralla (the opposition party). The polls initially showed that the opposition party was in the lead and then the computer system went down for several hours. When it was re-booted, the current administration, the nationalists, were in the lead. This has resulted in the demand for a recount and riots in the streets by the opposition party supporters.  The protesters have set up road blocks on the major roads which have cut off most of the country from the major cities.  Up until yesterday, there h...

Baby "Z"'s tiny feet Ya know that song by the Beatles " I've got a feeling, a feeling deep inside  Oh yeah, oh yeah, that's right  I've got a feeling, a feeling I can't hide  No no no, oh no, oh no  Yeah yeah I've got a feeling yeah No no no, oh no, oh no  Yeah yeah I've got a feeling yeah."  Anyway ... that's the song that popped into my head this morning as I was walking to the hospital pharmacy and saw what was unfolding outside the front door. A obviously pregnant woman was being wrestled from a car into a wheelchair as she was flailing and screaming. I had a feeling, a bad feeling, about this one.    It wasn't the fact that she was screaming and flailing (lots of women do), it was a weird feeling deep in my gut that something was very wrong.  The guy in the emergency room was going to have to wait.  After I was wrestling her into the labor bed, I find that she had a sudden onset of severe abdominal pain an hour ago a...

Cows walking down the hospital dirt road No, that wasn't a typo. I didn't mean to write "pigs". I really am going to talk about poop because in Honduras, poop flies! But bear with me as a I give you a little background to this story.  The Cornerstone Foundation was formed by Dr Jeff and Rosanne McKenney in 1992 when they felt God calling them to start a mission hospital in Honduras to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the people. The building of the hospital brought roads, water supply, electricity, and the Gospel to a very poor, forgotten people group on the northern coast of Honduras.  Hospital Loma de Luz is located about 2 hours down a bumpy dirt road by public bus from the nearest grocery store.  The public bus and motorcycles are the most common forms of transportation around here because most Hondurans cannot afford a car. Hondurans can fit their entire family of 4 or 5 people on a motorcycle (How many can you fit on yours?) Even we missionaries mo...

  "CQ Balfate! We need help in the labor room NOW!" Visiting midwife Abigail's normally calm, nothing-phases-me voice came calling on the radio in complete panic one evening in June.  I jumped over the mattress that a friend and I were trying to pull up my apartment stairs tripping the rest of the way down and ran out the door. "I'm not wearing shoes! Where are my shoes?" I run back inside, grab the nearest pair of flip flops I could find, run back out the door and across the two suspension bridges to the hospital. If Abigail was panicking, then something had to be really wrong.  The baby was being resuscitated by Dr Isaac on the baby warmer when several other of the doctors and I entered the room. He was massive. This was no baby. He was a full grown todddler! "Brutus" (affectionately nicknamed by Dr Ryan) weighed in at a whopping 10 lbs 1oz. He was so big, compared to the average 6lb Honduran baby, that his shoulder was stuck behind his littl...

     "Do you want to see a picture of the accident?" Tio (Uncle) asked in Spanish. I startled. In spite of how hard the chair I was sitting in was and the constant beeping of the monitors and ventilator, I had dozed off for a few seconds. It was now 2am and the fact that I had been awake for almost 24 hours was starting to catch up with me.      Tio handed me his cell phone. Even in the darkness of the picture, I could see the carnage. A cow split in half on the dirt road with three mangled bodies laying in a semi-circle around it. Jose was driving his motorcycle, with his two friends on the back, too fast, much too fast in the middle of the night. The cow he slammed into on the road was torn in half by the impact and their bodies thrown onto the road.      Jose and his friends were taken to a government run hospital in the city where the two friends were treated and released. Jose had a broken arm and shoulder, multiple broken ribs, a fr...

     Strept throat is one of those things that we all get at least once in our lives. I, for one, have had it several times. Not a big deal right? One just goes to the doctor for antibiotics and that's that. Did you know that antibiotics that one is prescribed for strept throat are not actually for your throat but to protect your heart? Left untreated, the  group A streptococcus virus can cause inflammation of the kidneys and rheumatic fever leading to joint pain and  potentially damage to the valves of the heart.   That is what happened to Digna.  Digna is a twenty-one year old woman who had untreated strept throat at one time. It had infected the mitral valve of her heart causing it to narrow significantly. This narrowing of the mitral valve causes increased pressure in the heart which in turn, has caused Digna's heart to enlarge significantly.  Digna's enlarged heart          Upon coming into our clinic abo...

     Over the past several years here at Hospital Loma de Luz, our patient acuity (the level of how sick a patient is) has been rapidly increasing. The hospital is open 24/7 with an on-call OB provider for our patient who arrive in labor, on call general provider, and an on-call surgeon to take care of any type of patient who comes in our gate. Our increasing acuity has resulted in our increasing need for blood transfusions. In the States, the Red Cross bus comes around doing blood drives and then sends the units of blood to hospitals where it goes into the Hospital's blood bank. It is kept in the blood bank until it is needed for a patient. If one of my patient's needed blood, I would go to the blood bank and they would have the blood ready for me. We do things a little bit different here in Honduras. We don't have a blood bank we ARE the walking blood bank.          Upon arriving in Honduras to serve here at Hospital Loma de Luz, every mi...

Our surgeon Dr. Alexander performing abdominal surgery with scrub techs Alan and Bayron       As nurse, I have always prided myself in the fact that I can handle all things gross. Anything that comes out of any orifice of anyone's body (even the ones that shouldn't be there) blood, gore, severed limbs... I've got this. I'm nurse. It's what I do...aside from my foot fetish. I don't care how clean they are. I don't touch yours so you don't touch mine. Deal?       Usually I do not spend too much time in the operating room. I mostly work in our in-patient ward, labor and delivery room, and emergency room.  In January, it was decided that it would be really helpful during emergencies, if I was trained to assist in the operating room. I spent the month of January working along side of our Honduran operating room assistants (called scrub techs) learning where everything is, the names of countless surgical tools and instruments, how to set up ...

Well it's that time again. Time for another mandatory trip out of Honduras to renew my visa. I can't believe how fast the past almost 4 months have gone by. It feels like I just returned to Honduras from my last trip. Although I am loving the chance to go back to the States every three to four months, the trips are quite a hassle but always are an adventure even though something always seems to go wrong. I only left Hospital Loma de Luz this morning but I can already tell you that this adventure is no different. I already have a story that I can add to my growing collection such as when my flight into Honduras was diverted to El Salvador (a completely different country than I was supposed to be in), a nearly missed runway collision in Dallas, and getting stranded in the Atlanta airport for two days. It the mist of it all God has always had his hand of protection on me. Through all the mishaps I have met some amazing people who I never would have met otherwise, got El Salvado...

Each of those charts represents a soul with their own unique story       When it rains, it pours here. Both literally and figuratively. While most of America is digging their cars out of snow, Honduras is in the middle of it's rainy season. The yearly rainy season brings strong rain storms almost every afternoon and sometimes we do not see the sun for days. The rain and freezing cold temperatures of 70 degrees in the evenings tends to keep people in their houses. There are multiple rivers in the nearby towns that become difficult to cross due to flooding which results in fewer clinic patients and fewer patients coming into the emergency room after clinic hours.  December and January have been fairly calm but when it rains, it pours!          After two very calm weeks over Christmas, everyone decided to come to the hospital on New Year's Day. I was just about to head out the door to church when our new Honduran nurse, Melissa, fra...