Day 4: Gastro

I asked the group how to start the blog entry today. As it is currently 9:30PM and we just received the pizza we ordered at 7PM, they aren’t the most happy of campers and they asked me to make a general announcement that ordering food in Guatemala is not the way to go.

Anyways, today we spent the morning from 8-1PM at Roosevelt, in the gastroenterology unit. We entered feeling more or less prepared  after hours of research the night before and particularly after receiving advice from Margarita at BJC. We entered the unit where we were working while nurses were administering an endoscopy. The smell definitely woke us up.  The nurses brought over much of the equipment we were shown yesterday and reiterated just how important the endoscopy equipment is to the hospital. They mentioned it costs 12,000 Quetzales to receive an endoscopy at a private practice and there is a constant influx of patients in need of these services. Unfortunately the nurse present today had completely different views (which we confirmed were true) than the views we received yesterday explaining what caused them to deem the equipment unusable. Therefore a lot of the research we conducted was not as useful as we had anticipated.

Inside the Pentax Processor of the endoscope. We decided to change the bulbs and rewire the connection.

Inside a respirator, it is heating up way too quickly making it dangerous to use.

We spent the next hours working on further diagnosing and working on equipment. We left with a lot of questions because we have never been trained or worked on this equipment previously. We did successfully fix a monitor before we headed off to the mall to eat and start researching answers to the questions we accumulated during the workday.

We are excited to have a full day tomorrow at Roosevelt and will hopefully make some more headway with all of the equipment we started researching today!