So while I'm Chichicastenango we ended up working a kinda crazy schedule. We went to a different small town in the mountains every day. We were really busy to say the least.
Each of these small towns has a little public building or Centro de Salud that we worked in. These places generally only had two rooms and since Patty was doing GYN, me and beth had to share a little room. We put up a curtain and saw patients in a little 6x10' area... we even shared an exam bed! Not something I'd probably ever have to do in the US.
We saw about 40 patients a piece each day. This was especially challenging since we had to totally rely on translators as many of these patients did not even speak Spanish- only K'iche maya!
Most of our patients presented with a lot of issues with allergies and pain from their lifestyle of extremely hard work. Most of the meds we ended up giving out were ibuprofen, ranitidine, and Loratadine. Although the doses we gave were pretty short, we tried to do a lot of patient education that would end up fixing these problems better than medicine. Eating a diet that wouldn't cause gastritis, wearing tennies instead of sandals, drinking more water, using gentler or less detergents... and so on. However we did see some more serious complaints as well. In Guatemala the small towns have state run clinics, the department seats have hospitals but the only intensive medical care can be received in Guatemala City.
We had some patients with longstanding severe issues that, in the US, would have been treated with immediate admission, IV ABx, and serious pain meds. However, since a lot of these people could not afford transport, housing, and medical care in the city, they were just living in these small towns with these serious issues, treating fentanyl level pain with aspirin.
This is why prevention is so important. If these infections or kidney issues had been treated with basic abx or HTN meds in the first place, so much expense, pain, and morbidity could have been avoided.
