Third Time - Just As Charming

I am still a ninja. A body fluid ninja. I thought that I might’ve lost my skills after so much inactivity, but cholera outbreak #3 (occurring exactly 9 months after the original outbreak, for those of you that also find dates interesting) confirmed that I’ve still got it.

A week and a half ago, I was looking forward to sleeping in after a few days of mobile clinics. Jon and I were sitting at the table after everyone had left for the day when my phone rang. On the other end was a semi-frantic sounding Fabienne (medical director for MTI), talking a mile a minute. “Oh good. Does the new guy have Mark’s phone? I think he’s ignoring my calls. I’ve been trying to get you since 2am. Cholera has exploded in Port-de-Paix. Wednesday night they had 50 patients, by last night it was up to 100, and as of this morning they have 250 patients. They’ve overflowed the hospital rooms into the hallway and they’re spilling out into the yard and the walkways…” She continued to fill me in, said she was going up that afternoon with some logistics people from GRU, then said, “Can you come with me?”

            After some discussion with Jon about how the week would work (including how we were getting a 16-year-old paraplegic girl to Minnesota for surgery), he assured me he would be fine and said I should go. I called Fabienne back and was told to meet at MTI to leave at 2pm.

            It turned into a Haitian operation. I got to MTI at 2 and waited around for a while. At 3pm, I thought, “Oh, we’ll probably be in the air in an hour,” so I took my dramamine. For some reason, I was under the impression that we were flying up and working the nightshift, since Evangel (MTI’s long term head nurse) and Nick (their volunteer) were there alone. At 4pm, we left MTI and drove to GRU. Where we continued to wait around. When we left there at 5pm, got gas, and then had a brief prayer session, I realized that we were, in fact, driving the whole way to Port-de-Paix. A six hour drive. On second thought, yes, I will eat that bag of Fritos, thanks.

            The highlight of the trip was definitely reaching Saint Marc before sunset and being able to see my old house from the street. That wasn’t too long before I got really drowsy and we turned onto a dirt/gravel road. I kept thinking, “Okay, we’ll soon be off this road, then I can put my head against the window while I fall into a coma.” But the road never ended. Shortly before we reached MTI’s apartment around 11pm, I regained consciousness long enough to see the lights from the island of Tortuga.

            Luckily, I had assumed incorrectly once again, and we weren’t actually going to work the nightshift. So Saturday morning, bright and early, we headed down the street to Centre Medical Beraca. I stepped through the gate and was actually overwhelmed for around 6 seconds. I think I actually said “holy cow” out loud. By that morning, the number of patients had risen to 330, and they were laying absolutely everywhere. It all hit me at once, the sheer number of people (because every patient had family members with them), the smell, and that feeling that I can’t explain. What was different was the noise. It seemed so loud. Maybe it’s because I’ve always worked cholera at night. Whatever it was, after those first few seconds, I snapped out of it and went to work.

            We worked into the early afternoon, then it was decided that Evangel and I would go back to the apartment, sleep for a few hours, and return to work the nightshift. I was happy with that – I had actually volunteered myself and kept pushing to have some of us on nights because that’s when things were bound to get crazy. It felt weird doing cholera without any marines, and I was hoping the familiarity of the darkness would make it seem more normal.

            The only things I clearly remember from that first night are the absolute frustration Evangel and I felt with the Haitian staff, the stress of all the patients and family members (we peaked at 400) calling us and tapping us every three minutes all night long, and thinking I was going to be sick. At one point, I thought I was going to pass out and asked Evangel to take my blood pressure – 85/50. She’s like, “Why don’t you just sit here and drink your water?” For those of you who have lots of experience with passing out, you know that it makes you feel a little nauseous. Not something you want to feel while working cholera. All I could think of was how embarrassing it would be to get cholera, especially since I’ve said so many times that you have to try really hard to get it. As the week progressed, we discovered that I really only had strep throat…which then moved into my chest. The cough I still have is a souvenir from the week.

            I decided I should try to write some things down during the week if I had a chance. From Sunday morning, after our first nightshift:

“One of the 3000 times I was frustrated with a patient and/or family member last night, I said, ‘Why can’t you just trust me?! I’m not going to let you die!’ When I’m not stepping over bodies or watching someone puke rice water on my boots, I feel a little bit of weight from that. Especially since I watched the woman I thought was dying while I held used tape over someone else’s pulled IV site…Should sleep. It’s a trade off – there aren’t dead bodies in the break room here, but I’ve gotta sleep on IV tubing instead of water bags.”

Tuesday

“Scratch that. Evangel and I found the best sleeping spot ever. Absolutely gigantic water bladders full of potable water. Didn’t I just say a month ago that I wanted a water bed? Right outside the gate by the new tents but close enough that we can still hear who’s puking (and a Haitian nurse come change the bag, conveniently enough).

Last night was by far the best (of this outbreak). The staff has gotten into a routine and they evaluate people a little better now instead of just jabbing every person that sits in front of them, so its relatively calm until like 4am. I’m not sure if everyone wakes up to discover they’ve got cholera, or if the nurses get sick of individualized treatment, or just feel like they haven’t gotten to practice their skills enough during the night, but we run a lot more lines in the morning/around change of shift. But Ev and I took over triage this morning. The Haitian nurse moved into the walkway to put a line in a kid Evangel asked for help with because we were both starting IVs in active pukers. So then people that didn’t like that I said they just needed to drink went to her and she stuck them! We’re like, ‘Mm, no no.’ We’re getting good at being mean. Or, Evangel and Nick are; I was already jaded. But she told people that if someone really sick comes in we won’t have fluid to give them and they’ll die because someone who didn’t need LR got it.

Moved mystery worm kid to Urgence. Really humbling when I was first evaluating him this morning – he’s still sunken and floppy but hasn’t been puking for a day and he drinks. Still has weird yellow diarrhea. I was leaving the room to see if there was a place in the tent, still talking to mom. Some woman laying on the table was saying, ‘Nis!’ repeatedly. Irritated by being interrupted yet again by someone who probably wanted me to know their IV was finished when they’d been told that now they could just drink, I sighed and was like, ‘Okay, tale [wait]!’ After I was done talking, the conversation went like this: ‘Okay, ki sa [what]?’ Blah blah, couldn’t hear her. ‘Sa ou bezwen [what do you need]?’ Then mom says, ‘Li renmen ou [She loves you]!’

Patient count yesterday afternoon was 328, so going down. 122 discharges, 104 admits. The second night was when I discovered I still hadn’t been in the actual hospital. Ha.

Officially have red bumps on my big tonsils and the back of my throat but I don’t feel like crap anymore. The perks of having a fever in Haiti are that you get cold enough to have goosebumps…”

My last night working was quite eventful. Evangel had gone into town to get supplies earlier in the day, so she planned to sleep for awhile and go in late. I wasn’t wild about walking to the hospital by myself in the dark in an area I wasn’t familiar with. But eventually I figured I had no choice. I went over thinking to myself, “Okay, situational awareness, situational awareness.” So knowing what was beside me caused me to miss what was in front of me. I tripped over some concrete, nearly falling into dogs that were circling a street fire.

            When I got there, I found the entrance and back hallways had been cleared out. The census was down to 240. I actually thought it was creepier with all the people gone.

            Ten minutes after I got there, I was rounding on the patients in the Urgent Tent and a nurse came running over for me because a kid in triage was seizing. There was not a thermometer in the whole place. He seized again 80 minutes later, for 45 seconds. I got the ambu bag for that one. Not sure what I intended to do with it. Evangel got there soon after with valium. The seizures weren’t cholera related, so my initial assessment had been correct, which was encouraging. He did fine throughout the rest of the night, and we had the doctor see him in the morning.

            Around 3am, we heard an ambulance pulling up. Confused, we went to investigate. There was a woman, she looked around my age, very pregnant and in labor. We took her into the actual hospital and stayed with her for about an hour and a half. She’d had two C-sections before and they decided to do another one for this baby. I was trying really hard not to laugh. I’d only been able to sleep for two hours that afternoon because people woke me up to ask questions and Jon had been calling me from Port-au-Prince. And then it was just too stinking hot. Anyways, the exhaustion made lots of inappropriate things funny. But the pregnant woman was also really cute. She’d go from screaming and singing during contractions to just having a very rapid conversation. In the middle she’d of a sentence (or, that’s what it seemed like, I couldn’t actually understand her), she’d pause and go, “Nis…” and look at Evangel like, “Please rub my back again.” Around 5am, we heard the generator go on for the surgery.

            Around change of shift, Evangel and I found a guy laying by himself on a bed out in the grass between the Urgent tent and the building. He was unresponsive. He had a line, but it was little and wasn’t running that well. I looked at his hands and said, “Heyyy, a molasses man.” Evangel gave me a really confused look, and I tried to explain while we were both sticking 18gauge needles in his arms. “This is how most people looked in Saint Marc. Because nobody knew what was going on, they were all super sick.” This particular guy was so dehydrated, his veins so fragile, Evangel and I both blew our lines. So we ended up putting a bp cuff around his current bag and inflating it as far as we could to run it in really fast.

After two bags he started perking up, getting a little confused. At one point we had to go catch him so he didn’t fall out of bed. Evangel was talking to two guys who wanted jobs as a translator and I was being the one-on-one for the climber, when a Haitian nurse comes up to me saying, “Problem!” I was like, “Uhh…okay. You stay with this guy, don’t let him fall. Where’s the problem?” In the Urgent tent. I had been there half an hour before, and everyone seemed to be doing well. We were actually taking out some lines and sending some people home. One old lady (the woman I thought I watched die the first night), had been sitting up eating when I was in there before, so she was about ready to go home.

            But when I walked into the tent, there she lay on the ground. The huge flies that had been attacking us every morning when the sun came up were buzzing all around her. I checked for heart sounds as a formality, then closed her eyes. Evangel came into the tent then and we both stood looking at her for a few moments. Just a few hours before, the two of us had been talking and she asked if there was something wrong with her because she didn’t necessarily have a lot of emotions regarding all the patients. I told her that there might be something wrong, but I felt the same way, so we were at least in the same place. But we both felt something while we stood with the patient’s husband.

            Before we went back to the apartment that morning, we checked in on our new mom. The baby was a girl. Mom was happy to see us. She was really smiling, but she was also shaking. We told the doctor that we thought she might have an infection and he went to examine her. We went to sleep. A few hours later, I was awakened by a phone call from Jon that started out, “Sarah…don’t freak out…” He’d been in a moto accident and ended up missing his flight to the States. He was also having a mild panic attack about getting the medevac patient onto the tarmac. I tried to be very calm. After I got off the phone, I sent my own panicky email to Mark. While I lay there unable to sleep, the doctor and some of the MTI staff came back to lunch. I overheard them talking about the C-section patient. She had died.

            Just a few hours earlier, I had been talking Nick through the death of the older lady. He kept talking about what he should’ve done differently – how he should’ve checked on her more or been more diligent with taking blood pressures. I tried to reassure him that he did all he could. This was, in fact, exactly what had happened to my first patient that died – the lady in the blue dress. She had recovered from the actual disease, the cholera wasn’t in her body anymore. But the stress on her heart from the electrolyte imbalance was just too much. That all makes sense enough that I could let it go. But my pregnant lady…that one actually woke me up the next night and I sent one of my friends a “what the heck?!” email.

            By Thursday, the census was down below 100, and I needed to get back home for an incoming volunteer. After we’d driven for about three hours, I decided I’d be audacious enough to ask if we could make a five minute stop in Saint Marc. The country director of MTI said he’d do me one better and we’d stop and have lunch there. We stopped at the Deli Mart, the last place I’d eaten out there (interestingly enough, it had been on Thursday October 28, nine months to the day – thanks overactive memory). I was too excited to sit still or eat anything.

            When I finally directed Ted down our street (a few minutes prior he’d said to me, “When you’re done being lost, let me know”), it looked like a ghost town. There were no kids on the basketball court. The market was gone. In its place was a fenced in concrete…area. There were still those few moto drivers by the fence harassing me, though, as I walked up to my gate. At the same time, Merites rode up on his bicycle. I called his name and ran up to hug him. “Ou sonje mwen [Do you remember me]?!” I asked. “Wi, Miss Sarah!” he hugged me again. I went through some formalities, then asked after the small child. “Is he here?” “No.” My face fell. But then he started talking again, and I caught enough of the words to realize he was asking if I wanted someone to find him. I said yes, and then he asked if I wanted to come in.

            I sat in the courtyard on a kid’s school chair that Merites cleaned off for me. There was a new painting on the wall and two more basketball hoops. (Interestingly enough they were positioned on different walls than before – does this have something to do with me popping the one soccer ball when I threw it over the hoop and into the barbed wire? We’ll call that part of my legacy…) After about ten minutes, I was starting to get anxious. I didn’t know when they were going to find Licson, and I felt bad for the people in the car who were gracious enough to make this “five minute” stop. Then his dad came running through the gate, followed by the small child with a huge smile on his face. I ran up to him and gave him a huge hug. I feel like he’s grown up since I left – he’s definitely taller. We talked for a few brief minutes. Then I said that I needed to go but that I would come back again – I don’t know when, but I will come back. I hugged everyone again and walked back to the truck. Even though I’d said goodbye to all of them in November, I feel like I got a little bit of closure from that visit. Definitely better than screaming goodbye to people across the street while I’m taken away in the back of a truck.

            And now here I sit in Port-au-Prince, on Wednesday the 3^rd, (the day of said kidnapping), awaiting a tropical storm. Like I know I’m weird about the date thing…but this is a little weird. Tomas on Thursday/Friday November 4/5. Now I just have furniture and I’m sweating more. I’ve been here too long…I’m really not terribly concerned about this storm. (Besides, the hurricane center says she’s “become disorganized”…how much damage can a disorganized storm do?) I’m considering strapping myself to one of the columns of the carpark. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

It Takes A Village

This is why people have nine months to prepare for children. Maeve and I were acting as foster parents this past week, and I contemplated going to bed at 8pm tonight. Baby Ralph (who’s real name is Markensson) is a 6-10 month old Maeve has been dealing with since I went home in May. He was brought into the clinic with a chest infection and was treated in the hospital. He ended up staying there for about a week because of social issues. He is not being raised by his parents, and there are many different stories circulating about where his parents are/if they are still alive. The hospital wanted to put him in an orphanage. Maeve was trying to avoid that, but eventually did find one the hospital worked with that she felt was acceptable.

Baby Ralph was finally discharged into the care of his “aunt” (who always works during the day, so it’s really an 11-year-old girl that takes care of him) on the condition that they bring him back to the clinic each day so Maeve could give him his antibiotics. Last Tuesday I got a phone call from her asking if we could take him in for a few days. Somehow he got an infection in his arm, and he had two draining wounds. We think they were in a sinus or something, because they were also draining into the area outside his lungs and giving him a horrible cough. But the hospital wouldn’t take him back because of the social issues. So I was sitting at the kitchen table when she walked in holding the little bugger, shrugged her shoulders, and gave me a look that said, “I didn’t know what to do.”

Night One: We put the baby to bed around 8:30 (in our bed…did I mention that Ralph also had scabies?), and Maeve went to bed shortly after. I, of course, stayed up for awhile longer. I think I finally went to bed a little before 11. I’d been asleep for about half an hour when he started crying. The whole night is running together in my memory now, but I know that he was up again at 12:30, 1:45, and at 2:30, Maeve and I just stayed up talking until about 4. We’re pretty sure he got spoiled at the hospital being held all the time, and they had said that he slept all day and stayed up all night (thanks for that, daytime nurses), and he was teething on top of that. We wanted to just let him cry, but unfortunately, the landlord’s wife is in during the month of July, and she had actually wanted to kick us out. But for some reason, she graciously allowed us to stay in the bottom floor while she’s here. So we didn’t want our crying baby to wake her up.

Ralph woke us up yet again at 5, and Maeve asked if I would take him for a little bit since she had to get up soon to go to the clinic. Now, Ralph isn’t content to just have you awake. He doesn’t want you to get in a comfortable position. So even though I was holding him, it wasn’t enough for me to sit up in my bed. I had to be standing. So we went outside and walked around the house for an hour and a half. I tried sitting down in some of our broken bag chairs from the old house, but again, comfort does not equal happiness for the Ralphster.

He started doing this little thing where he’d yawn and then sigh. Like he was just exhausted from working really hard or something. It was irritating because it was so stinking cute. Keep me up all night and then sigh about it.

A little before 7 we went back in to wake up Maeve, and then we were going to feed him. Maybe it’s because he usually just has flour and water, but for some reason he was just not into beef and vegetable baby food. I was holding him, and Maeve had spooned over half a jar of food into him. Then he decided that was enough. Hot orange puke. All over both of us and the bed. Mornings are not my favorite. Maeve almost fell over from laughing so hard, but then she did also clean the puke off my arm and legs because I just continued to sit there.

We got Ralph a pacifier that day, and that helped a bit. Looking back, he really did sleep a little better, but we also got exponentially more tired throughout the week, so every time we woke up it was just 12 times worse (I know, all you actual parents are laughing at us). At one point, maybe during night four, I woke up to hear Maeve telling Ralph that she was going to put him outside the window. (I think that was also the night he peed on her.) We also considered putting him in the tent with Uncle Mark, but thought that might turn out worse for us in the end. (That may have also been the morning when we tried to murder the chickens with a lacrosse stick, but the loudest one got up into a tree. When the baby is actually sleeping, I don’t want to be awake due to some bothered rooster.)

At the end of the week, we had to return Ralph to the “aunt” (but really the 11-year-old), so that Maeve wasn’t accused of kidnapping him. He is not able to go to the orphanage now because we don’t know that at least one of his parents is dead. Different stories continue to circulate regarding their existence/whereabouts. But the little girl brings him back to the clinic each day, and we may end up getting him back again.

I think it’s amazing how quickly you can feel parental. The third night he was here, Ralph was in our room with the door shut. I was sitting at the kitchen table talking with people from another group who were taking their meals here. The Haitian staff had the TV blaring at a ridiculous volume (as usual), plus the radios on, plus the generator was running. And then I jumped up and went to my room because I knew he was crying.

And now the section where I brag about my foster baby. While he was here, Ralph learned to hold his own bottle. He still doesn’t hold it up in the air, but he can hang onto it. The way he sits is absolutely hilarious. I’m not sure what’s not quite right about it, but he looks a little bit like a little frog (he also reminds me a little bit of my cousins Eric and Lindsay’s dog). And he’ll sit there and then just suddenly do a face plant. But it’s kind of like he intends to do that, because then he’ll just stay here and cuddle up to whoever he just fell on. Something he loves that actually makes him sleepy is when someone rubs his nose. So basically, he’s just like Bud. (Because Baby Ralph is also beautiful.) And he has the cutest little smile. Which he whips out at inappropriate times, because usually you’re trying to be mad at him. And I can’t wait to have his little ‘fro cuddled up under my chin and kiss his little face again.      

Change of Address

Note to self: always pack shampoo in your carry-on. We left for the airport at 4:30am Monday morning. And can I just say that I’d been packed for 12 hours at that point? I actually went to sleep the night before. Anyways, my flight was at 8:40, and at 9:00 we were still on the ground. Then they announce that there’s a mechanical issue with the plane. Something with rivets. But that flight was not going to be taking off until at least 12pm. Flights to Port are quite limited (because really, who goes to Haiti?), and I figured that mine (which was supposed to depart around 2) was the last of the day. I waited in a line for over two hours to have the ticket woman ask me if I’d rather spend the night in DC or Miami. I picked Miami.

So I browsed through the bookstore, bought a book my mom already ordered, and paced around for awhile. At one point, I sat down and some boy came and sat next to me. I truly hope he could hear the Campus Chorale songs blaring from my ipod.

My flight to Miami was half an hour late, not that it mattered. What I was thinking of as a fun adventure was rapidly growing less fun. I tried to check my email in Miami, but they wanted to charge me for wifi. So I walked to my gate and found a suitable spot to curl up in a ball on the floor. But I only managed to sleep in sporadic 20 minute increments throughout the night because it was so flipping cold. I was wrapped up in my sweatshirt with the hood up. I pulled the tshirts out of my backpack and wrapped those around my legs. What a fine and pleasant misery.

My 6:45am flight to Port-au-Prince was delayed by an hour and a half due to issues with the intercom. Personally I thought they should all learn Morse code. Mostly because I felt bad for Mark, who had to get up in time to be at the airport at 7:40, and had no idea I was going to be late.

I arrived safely in the hot sun, sleepy and with dirty hair. I may have a mild obsession with washing my bangs. My roommate made fun of me fairly frequently during college because I was too lazy to take a shower, but always washed the front of my head in the sink. So I was a bit distressed when I discovered that we couldn’t go home right away. Well, not “home,” but to the house they moved into while I was gone. We had to take Maeve, Clare (the ESL teacher for We Advance’s literacy program), and two volunteers to the clinic first. But since the cab was full, Maeve and I sat in the truck bed, thus collecting massive amounts of dust/soot/smog. It all stuck incredibly well to my greasy hair, which made it look clean. And that’s enough information about my hair. Moving on…

Eventually Mark brought me back to the new house, which we are renting from another organization who sends teams down probably four times a year. We were told that when there isn’t a team here (so pretty much all the time) we can have the whole house. But I think the staff just end up sleeping inside when that happens. It’s confusing and I haven’t made much of an effort to figure it out. I know the lady who brings the food; the rest I’m still working on. Anyways, this new house…it’s nice. And big. Like, to the point where I’m embarrassed that I live here. I know it was a move DIRT needed to make, but personally I don’t like it. To be fair, I don’t like change (you’re all shocked, I know), and I hate leaving my memories in the old house. But the night I got back, one of my friends came over to visit and she looked around and said, “Well…just try to think of it as a blessing…” And this was after one of the volunteers said that the house seemed a bit inappropriate. There’s just no pleasing everyone I guess. We’ve either got a resident rat or a house that’s so fancy that I have yet to be bitten by a mosquito. So for my own peace of mind, can I just remind people that for eight months in Haiti I took bucket baths with water I drew out of cisterns? And I cooked outside on the ground with a propane stove and/or a single burner kerosene stove that only had half its wicks. And I electrocuted myself switching on the generator when the city power went out. I feel better now thinking of those things…as I lay here on a real bed, under a fan, looking at a dresser. And there’s a fountain outside my bedroom door. Ai yi yi. I miss my balcony. Anyways.

Yet another change we’re anticipating in a few weeks is a new country director. Mark is heading out, and Jon, who was with us for a little bit during January, is going to be taking over.

But even amidst all this change, there’s still those typical Haiti days. Thursday I went to the clinic to help out for a little bit. It was the maternity clinic day, and someone was coming to do ultrasounds. We hurried to get there in the morning (women were waddling in from every which way), only to find that we couldn’t turn the generator on because the plug had caught on fire. So a security guard ran around for an hour or so looking for a place to buy a new plug they could attach. I spent a good portion of the morning with the doctor and one of the volunteers, attempting to measure bellies and listening to heartbeats.

Mark picked me up partway through the day so we could go grocery shopping. He’s trying to teach me all the roads so we’re not completely lost when he leaves. We get out to the main road and he says, “Alright Magellan, take us to Megamart.” I told him, “Okay, just get me to Delmas.” Pause. Sigh. “Sarah…we’re on Delmas.”

We’d been home from our shopping trip for about five minutes when Mark’s phone rang. It was Les from MTI asking us to call ahead to St. Luc’s hospital to let them know he was bringing in a patient. The patient was in an ambulance and Les was following, but the ambulance had no medical people in it, or even equipment like a backboard or a cervical collar. Apparently it was a 25-year old male who’d been hit by a Minustah (some sort of UN thing) vehicle. Then a UN tank came by and they’re actually the ones who called the police…who called the ambulance. So, a hit and run by the UN…

A little bit later, Mark came into the house telling me we needed to go. Les called from the hospital and wanted our help. For some reason, I was surprised by this. After all, the guy was already in the hospital, so why did they need another nurse and EMT? Mark’s response to my question: “This is Haiti, so subtract all logic…”

This hospital is literally a mile down the road, and it took us 25 minutes to get there. Traffic is usually horrendous, but that day was especially bad because there was a book fair. At the sugar cane factory. (You can’t make this stuff up.) We got to St. Luc’s and eventually found the room with the CT scanner where the patient was. Within 30 seconds of entering the room, it became apparent why we were there. There was a crowd of staff around the patient, and the only people doing anything were the doctor (who was still giving orders) and Les. I was putting lead on and asking for gloves (in both languages about 6 times), when the doctor asked for someone to check a pulse. The patient had been responsive when they brought him in; they’d actually given him a mild sedative. But Les and I were both checking for femoral pulses when the doctor said, “I’m waiting for someone to tell me they have a pulse.” I told him that no one was going to tell him that because the patient didn’t have one. So we started CPR. After many unsuccessful attempts in both English and Creole (complete with hand motions) to get an AED, Les threw his lead on the floor and went to find one. He was successful, but when we turned it on, we discovered that it was in Spanish. We continued CPR for another 20 minutes, but never got a shockable rhythm. Time of death: 1724.

Yesterday morning we were sitting in the clinic waiting for the Haitian nurses to finish their education session and send the patients inside. I was sitting in a wheelchair, but my feet were on the floor. For a second, I thought I felt the floor shake. But no one else commented on it. Then it started again, and I knew I wasn’t imaging it. Maeve and I looked at each other, both thinking, “Is that…?” and “What should we do?” And then it stopped. Finally, one of the volunteers said, “Did you feel that?” Then the doctor ran into the room and goes, “Did you feel the earthquake?!” We found out later last night that it was a 3.5 with the epicenter in Leogane, and it lasted 45 seconds. So only a 3.5 – that’s only mildly disconcerting.    

Roots & Wings

I don’t think it’s surprising that after having the madre that I do, I currently feel like I’m living in a vacuum cleaner. For the last few weeks I feel like my mind is constantly going in at least 17 different directions. Which is why nothing in this blog post will be cohesive. But I figured it was time for another one nonetheless.

I worked at Medishare pretty much the entire month of April. I really really loved it, but it was exhausting at times. It was pretty apparent I needed a break the night I started laughing at a dead man. (Who had, in fact, died while I was putting an IV in him and drawing blood). One afternoon when I was working in the ER, they brought in a boy who’d been in a moto accident. His left leg had been partially amputated. When I think back on it now, the whole process really took a long time. Something that would’ve taken minutes in the States took hours in Haiti’s trauma 1 hospital. The tourniquet on his leg wasn’t terribly effective and he probably lost two units of blood just while laying on our table. So I was scrounging around looking for ace wraps or anything to put pressure on his leg. I’m not sure how long it actually took to get blood to do surgery. Mark and I had gone for blood the week before, and even though we told them it was an emergency, it took two hours (three if you include travel time). While we were waiting, I was talking to one of the doctors. He mentioned that he’d come to Haiti before to work in a different area through his church. I’ve gotten really good at condensing the last eight months, but I like to start out with, “Well, I initially came down through Eastern Mennonite Missions…” The exchange made me think of early Christians drawing half a fish in the sand – his brief comment to say, “I’m a Christian,” and my EMM comment to say, “Hey, I’m a Christian, too!”

The boy went to surgery not long after that, and he did make it through. But he’d lost too much blood and he died early the next morning.

One evening we were getting ready to leave when the doctor in triage asked if we could do a transport. Mark and I groaned a little bit inwardly but agreed. I think I may have groaned out loud when I found out it was a cholera patient. The last thing I felt like doing that night was boiling clothes. We were getting ready to head out, had the family in the back of the truck, and the doctor (who I affectionately called Hurricane Barbara) was giving me her report/commentary like a squirrel on speed. As she was about to hand me the baby, I caught a glimpse of her eyes. “She doesn’t have cholera.” Yep, the 9-month-old RN (or 7 months if you count the time I’ve actually practiced) blatantly told the doctor her diagnosis was incorrect. It took her about four seconds to regroup, then she started questioning me. “Well do you think it could be malaria? Typhoid? She had a fever of 104. Let’s ask the family again, they said she was having diarrhea and vomiting…” I don’t know, I can’t really give you a whole lot of pathophysiological answers, I just know she doesn’t smell like cholera and that it doesn’t manifest with fevers. Is that an acceptable answer after I contradict you? She really was quite understanding and told me that she’s never seen cholera before. Unfortunately she then also said, “It’s your call. You just tell me what you would do.” I’d been pretty sure of myself until I was the one with the final say. I decided she should stay and get fluids and be monitored. The whole way home I second guessed myself. Luckily, the next day Barbara shouted to me from across the compound as she was whizzing by that I’d been right.

That was one of the least disconcerting things (for others) that she shouted at me during her trip. One week I had been filling in for five days until some EMTs came to work in the ER. It was a father/son pair, the son newly certified (they don’t get much newer than that kid). The dad walked up and introduced himself to me, then immediately said, “Don’t you have to be 18 to work here?” I’ve grown quite accustomed to the comments about how young I look, so I responded with, “Well usually, but I’ll be 18 next month so they made an exception.” I mostly found it ironic that he chose to pick on me when his son looked 14. Barbara was rounding on a patient the next morning and asked me to check on something because “those EMTs, they’re fresh, they don’t know anything. And what is that kid, 12?” I proceeded to tell her the introduction story. She looked at me a little confused and then walked away. She returned a few minutes later with another nurse who was laughing. She had believed my sarcastic comment and pulled someone aside to say that even if I had a license, she felt a little uncomfortable having someone who was only 18 taking care of patients. Heather just asked her if she was crazy. A few days later, I was in the ER with a new batch of Medishare volunteers when Barbara yelled from the unit next door, “Sarah! I talked to your mom last night and I’ll be at your high school graduation!” She winked at me then was off, while everyone else just stared at me.

One afternoon, Mark came into the ER to say we might have to leave to transport a patient. There was a 7-year-old boy up north who’d fallen three stories and they were going to fly him down. It must’ve taken a little too long to try to find someone to pay for the flight and organize the transport, because eventually Mark came back and said that if the transport happened, it wasn’t going to be until the next day. Luckily, the little boy made it through the night. Less fortunate was Mark coming to me the next day and saying we had to fly up to get him. It was a little missionary Cessna, not medically equipped. So we ran around collecting everything we thought we could possibly need. My pockets were full of different syringes of medications.

The flight up was uneventful. When we found the little boy, there were no medical professionals with him. Just his family members. Who were holding a bag of IV fluid. Not good. I thought that one of the cardinal rules of head injuries (especially when you can’t measure the intracranial pressure) was that you don’t want to load someone with fluid and increase the pressure in their head. Ai yi yi.

I wasn’t happy with what I was finding while assessing him. He wasn’t following my commands (I gave him a bit of grace in that since my Creole probably left a bit to be desired), he wasn’t talking, and he didn’t withdraw when I poked his feet with a needle. I gave Mark one of my syringes and some brief instructions on where to hit his leg with the med if the boy started seizing.

About five minutes into the flight, I was reassessing and was trying to get him to open his eyes. He wasn’t responding to me, and I started freaking out. It was only a few moments, maybe 30 seconds, until I agitated him enough that he opened his eyes. But the things that went through my mind and the conclusion I drew that really there wasn’t much I could do while in the air with an ambu bag and some blood pressure meds made it seem much longer.

Thankfully, that was the scariest moment of the flight. Unfortunately, it was also one of the best. We had to fly pretty low because of the head injury/pressure situation, and low = bumpy. I just do not do well in small aircrafts. Shortly after my heart attack, I started feeling funny. Really hot and sweaty and like I was going to pass out. I remember thinking to myself, “This feels familiar…kind of like that time in the helicopter in Hawaii…” And I proceeded to throw up the rest of the way back to Port-au-Prince. I’m sure that was quite comforting for the patient’s mother. Once we were on the ground and on our way for a CT scan, I discovered that while vomiting, I had been able to squirt the medications in my pocket all over my scrubs. Who’s wearing the Labetalol? Yeah, that was me.

Nothing has compared with the stress of this past week, however. This is day 27 without power. The neighbors had been using their generators as well, and when we asked they told us they didn’t have city power either. But since then, we found out that the power to our house has been turned off because we haven’t paid the bill. I don’t think we’ve paid an electric bill the whole time I’ve been here. And the rent for the next year comes due at the end of this month. After talking through some options, we were a little hopeful that the landlord might let us pay month to month rather than the whole year. But we can’t even do that right now. One night earlier this week I was talking to a friend about this and he reminded me about Jesus telling one of his disciples to pull tax money out of a fishes mouth. It was really difficult for me to try and stop worrying, but after telling Jesus that we need $3000, there was really nothing else to do.

Yesterday morning I was laying on my bed in such distress about how I was letting DIRT fail that I couldn’t move, when Mark started hollering from the big room. One of his good friends unexpectedly got a ton of money, and he was willing to loan us $8000. Thank you, Jesus, for being an overachiever. (But I think I’m done learning patience now…)

In other news, the rat is dead. Last week Mark managed to sneak up on him and trap him under this plastic thing that keeps the flies off our food. He didn’t want to kill the rat until our volunteers had left for the clinic, so he set a nursing book and a saw on top of it. The next thing I knew, he was freaking out. The kitchen lady was walking out of the house holding the plastic thing. She claims she didn’t see the rat. A few days later, however, a curious smell was pervading the downstairs. After a little searching, we found the dead rat. Unfortunately, some maggots had found him first. We let Mark take care of it.

In exactly a week (or 167 hours and 44 minutes) I will be home for a few weeks. I’m a little bit excited. (Just a little). Today I was laying on the hammock thinking of all the things I’m going to do, like drink myself into a caffeinated craze at Starbucks with my cousins, take random road trips because I’ll be allowed to drive again, finally be able to go to family night, and get one of my best friends married off. Mark interrupted my daydreaming to ask about an ambulance policy. Ambulance reminds me of fast cars, which reminds me that I get to watch the Coke 600. Must focus. (167 hours, 35 mintes…)   

A Stitch In Time

I don’t like mornings. And I don’t like the phone. So when I get a phone call at 7:30am, and while I’m on the phone, another phone gets a text, and yet another phone starts ringing, I’m not terribly amused. Adam is still out of the country since earthquakes are becoming pretty popular, and Mark went back to the States for a week last Monday, so I have both of their phones in addition to my own. I’ll go ahead and admit to the panic attack I had that morning before we took him to the airport. We were getting three volunteers in that afternoon, and as of 6 hours before their arrival, I had yet to get confirmation on any of the things I was trying to set up for them. I told one of my friends that I was really hoping this was one of those things where God was trying to teach me patience and to trust his timing, and thankfully I was right.

After dropping off Mark at the airport, we picked up Isabella, an Italian photographer staying with a friend’s organization, and we took her to Sister Marcella’s for a few hours. The place looks really different – it’s painted and there are babies and toys and equipment – all signs of life. I know I say this every time I write about going back there, but it’s just so strange. I was telling Stephen (a friend of Adam’s from previous Haiti and Pakistan work who was here for a few weeks) how every time I walk in that building I see all of our patients. An 11-year-old girl who just wouldn’t get better, a guy with pink crocs who also had worms, and a little old lady with orange hair who we all affectionately called “Grandma” who got 26 bags of fluid.

After taking Isabella back to Brenda’s house, Stephen and I headed to the airport to pick up our volunteers. Mike and Justin had worked cholera with us at Sister Marcella’s in November, and Justin was also bringing his girlfriend along. Even though I’d only been with them for a week back then, there are only eight other people who can understand that experience, and it was so good to have two of them back. I’ve definitely enjoyed the other volunteers we’ve had since, but I loved when, for example, we’d drive past something and one of them would say, “Hey, isn’t this where Brenden fell out of the truck?” For once, I had people that remembered all the stories I told. And they were also quite impressed by the fact that we now have a refrigerator and running water.

The downside, however, of having people come back who worked with us in a crisis, is that there’s no longer a crisis. We had something to do each day, but it wasn’t nearly as stimulating for them as keeping people alive. Saturday morning we picked up a baby from the Germans and took her to Medishare, so it was nice that they got to have the experience of hanging out on the tarmac and checking out all the broken down/wrecked planes and helicopters that take up most of the space. But after returning to the house, we didn’t have any other work plans. So we decided we’d hang out for a little just in case we needed to do another transport and then head up to Ibolele to get some food and watch basketball. About 45 minutes after coming up with that plan, I got a call from the head nurse at Medishare asking us to come back and work. So Justin and Mike went to triage and I worked in Med/Surg. Some combination of us continued working there for the rest of their trip. Katie came with us on Sunday because they needed help feeding and holding babies in Pediatrics. At one point I went over to check on her and she had a baby in each arm. So cute. I spent the rest of the week there, which I absolutely loved. The only thing that I was kind of bummed out about was that Monday and Tuesday we had set up a couple locations for Katie to do cholera education at and I was looking forward to it because that’s something we haven’t done before.

So many random patients came into the hospital this week. We had some births, we had some deaths, we had mystery diagnoses, and pressure ulcers. I’ll save the detailed stories, because when one of the Medishare nurses (they volunteer for a week) asked me some questions about cholera, she told me I should see a counselor after she heard my responses. No, I did not get to deliver the baby. But we’ve now had four in a matter of three days, so I’m figuring if there’s another one and I happen to be there, the doctor just might let me help out. I did, however, finally get to suture someone! I’ve only been practicing for this day since October 31. I was filling in in triage on Friday morning, and in the midst of seizing babies, a woman with an abscess on her bum, and a patient with an infected leg, a woman came in with a sliced hand. Becca, another nurse who had done sutures for the first time earlier that morning, asked if I wanted to take care of her. Then we asked the doctor if he was okay with that, and after saying yes, he left. So Becca and I decided that to do sutures you either need one doctor or two nurses. At one point while I was getting stuff together, a translator asked me if this was my first time. “Yes it is. Don’t tell the patient.” And Becca agreed, “Yeah, we never tell the patient that.” After I’d finished, the ER doctor was passing by and stopped to see what we were up to. Apparently the silk we used was a bit too big, but hey, stitch and learn. I thought it was pretty. My very first stitch was a little tight, so she’ll have a bit of a bigger scar there. But now that I’ve had someone that legit needs stitches, I’m ready to take volunteers. Adam once said he’d let me practice on him, and now I’d be okay with that. Maybe that’s why he’s staying in Japan…

Another interesting aspect to the week was that I had nursing students! How very strange. At one point during one of the days, I was sitting on the counter charting (that took some getting used to – paper charting…all during clinicals I just scanned things, clicked things, and checked boxes) when one of the students starting asking me questions about drugs. Then she started writing down what I was saying. That’s when I was like, “Shoot, I need to find a drug book.” Before I knew it, I had 8 girls in white uniforms around me listening to me talk about medications. One day, my student was giving me a report on my patients vitals (they just did baths and vital signs) and she told me that the patient’s temperature was 91.6 F. I’m not quite sure what my translator told her, but what I said was, “Mmm no, I don’t think so.” Upon further investigation, I discovered that she had no idea what normal was. After telling her, I asked what she thought we might want to do if we had a temperature of 91.6. She didn’t know. So I suggested taking it again. While we waited the five and a half minutes it takes for the thermometer, I tried to explain to her what our patient might look like if that was an accurate temp. But the fact that she was sitting up and complaining of pain indicated that we should probably double check for accuracy. I’m not sure how effective my teaching was. After that is when I started semi-joking about starting a nursing school here. The next day one of the nurses I’d been working with asked if I was serious because she’d be willing to come down and teach… 

'Almost' Doesn't Count

So close, and yet so far. Today I was working with a friend’s organization doing a mobile clinic, and the doctor asked me to bandage up a kid’s leg. Lo and behold, this child had sliced open his leg quite nicely and needed stitches. I told the doctor what I thought and she asked if I was going to do the suturing. Silly question. I’ve taken to carrying around Brenden’s suture kit with me wherever we go. So I had the translator tell the little guy that I needed to give him some shots with medicine to take the pain away and that it was going to burn a little bit at first. I had a teeny tiny little needle, and it was pretty tough to get that into his skin to give him the lidocaine. But after four shots of that, he was all numbed up (and probably hating me). Let me just say, this little Haitian boy did not have skin at all like the banana and mango peels that I practiced on. In fact, his skin was so tough that I couldn’t get my needle through. I tried two different sizes and types of silk and got nothing. I asked the doctor if she wanted to try and she said, “Well if you can’t get it, I won’t be able to either.” So at least she had confidence in my skills. But I had to just bandage him up and hope he went to the hospital like we told him.

About three weeks ago, I got to accompany a patient on a med-evac flight to Philadelphia. It was a 13-year-old boy who was injured in November when he was climbing a tree and someone threw a rock at him. It hit him in the head and he fell out of the tree, landing on his face/stomach and breaking his back. That left him paralyzed from the waist down. He needed surgery to stabilize his spine, and they don’t have the capability of doing that anywhere in Haiti. He lives with his Grandma, and Grandma was going on the flights as well. The patient did very well and the flights were uneventful from a medical perspective. During the first flight (5 hours on a missionary plane built in 1943), Grandma leaned over and told me she needed to go to the bathroom. So I was walking her back because I didn’t want her to fall. There was an area behind the seats where the luggage was before the bathroom, and when we reached that area, she started to squat. I managed to say “NO!” enough times that she didn’t pee there and I got her to the bathroom. Unfortunately, before I could show her the toilet and put the lid up, she started peeing on the floor. Not just the floor, but the door, the shelf, and her foot as well. Thankfully, there was a roll of paper towels and lots of Lysol in the bathroom.

Once in Miami, Grandma and I went to do paperwork in customs while they transferred the patient to the air ambulance. It went really smoothly considering they didn’t have passports and I was trying to read Creole on their birth certificates. We were in the air before I realized that I should’ve had Grandma use the bathroom. All I could think was, “Dear Jesus, please don’t let her pee on this airplane…especially not while she’s practically sitting on top of me.” Well, the Lord was gracious. Grandma waited until we landed in Philly and then just peed right on the tarmac while the flight nurses freaked out behind me. “You can’t leave the hospital until you explain to her that she needs to use a bathroom!” “I know, I will. But you have to understand that she’s probably never seen a bathroom before.” “Well, she’ll get arrested for doing that here!” Luckily, the EMT driving the ambulance happened to have a step-grandfather who is Haitian and she called him and had him explain to Grandma how to use the bathroom.

We went to Shriner’s Hospital and I stayed for a little while waiting for my dad to pick me up. At one point (this was around midnight), the charge nurse told me I had a phone call. I was confused about why my dad didn’t just call my cell phone. But what I found on the other end of the line was a woman crying because she was so happy that the patient was finally in the States. Apparently she works for Sky Hope, an NGO in the States that does these flights, and she had been the one working to set up this flight for the past few months. So I had a 20 minute conversation with her about how it went and things like that. It was strange. Not that she called, just the fact that I was having a conversation with someone that I’ve never met and will probably never meet. It was one of those “surreal…but nice” moments. And then, since I was already in Philly, I got to spend a long weekend at home. The flight conveniently coincided with butchering weekend, which was wonderful. There are few things more beautiful than sitting down for lunch and seeing my entire family around me. And gut buckets. Just kidding. (Mostly). I told my Grandma that I wish I could be in two places at once. But I haven’t figured that out yet, so I’m back in Haiti, where I am hopefully succeeding in implementing the tips my family gave me for making my blog posts shorter…

Yesterday morning in between teaching our groundskeeper how to properly clean the bathrooms, I was sitting in my house in my mostly broken camping chair talking to my friend on chat. She’s been telling me for days that I need to blog, but I haven’t had anything to write about. The previous day involved me picking up barrels to burn our trash, getting a water truck to come to the house, singing obnoxiously loudly while I thought I was home alone and then the kitchen lady walked in, and then using our new staple gun to put screen over the faux transom on my balcony door. Not blogworthy at all, but I was trying to figure out how to make it so when Mark’s phone rang. He was nowhere to be found, so I answered it. It was the CNO from Medishare, and she said she had an American aid worker who came in the night before with malaria and dengue fever and needed to be med-evac’ed out, but he didn’t have med-evac insurance, so could we help figure that out? I told her I’d talk to Mark and call her back. Usually I get off those calls feeling really frustrated because I always have to say, “I don’t know, let me talk to Adam,” and I really need to be able to do this myself in a short amount of time. So Mark and I conferenced really quick and he started calling people to see if they knew of anyone and we were coming up short. Then I remembered crying Sky Hope lady. After a series of emails, she pulled through for me and was checking into flights. Mark and I decided we’d head over to Medishare and check the patient out ourselves.

The report I got from the doctor when we got there was ferocious (nurses, nursing students – ask me about it because it’s incredible and I’ve saved all my notes – making this guy better is my ICU dream job). After we were there for a little bit, the director for the patient’s organization discovered that he did have insurance after all, which was fantastic. That meant we could get an air ambulance to come right to PAP for him. And miraculously, they were going to be able to do it the same day, when usually no one can fly out of Port after dark. So all we ended up having to do was work out how to get us and our truck through security so we could take him right onto the tarmac and out to the jet. He was stable enough when we transported, considering he’d spent the past two days with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and had low blood pressure, a cough, fluid building up in his one lung, and very low red blood cell, white blood cell, and platelet counts, among other things. They gave me a bag full of injections to take with us just in case, but thankfully he didn’t need any of them.

This evening we got an email from the patient’s director. He said the night went relatively well, considering, but the patient has gone downhill today. He had to be intubated this morning and his platelet counts continue to be very low. Acute respiratory distress syndrome was something the doctor briefly mentioned to me that she was concerned about, among other very serious complications. So please pray for this man, specifically for his lungs and his blood cells/platelets counts.

Occasionally I still struggle with my decision to leave EMM, especially considering my original return date is 13 days from now, and wonder about how the support shifts when someone goes from “missionary” to “humanitarian aid worker.” Sometimes I just think it’s interesting that the support shifts at all. But this past weekend I got encouragement from one of our volunteers. The rest of the group was going out for the evening, and I was staying home hoping to have the house to myself. Unfortunately, one particular volunteer decided he wanted a quiet evening as well. Eventually we got into the two standard questions: “So how do your parents feel about you being down here?” and “What are the Mennonites?” Somewhere amongst my ramblings of trying to distinguish Mennonites and Amish (it’s more difficult than you’d think to try and explain something that is so ordinary to you), he brought up evangelism. And then someone who will only say that he “tries to go to church sometimes” told me that he thinks I’m exactly where I need to be to share my faith with people. 

Advocacy vs. Animosity

If I had a dime for every time one of my clinical instructors wrote that I was quiet or needed to be more assertive, I would be a very rich woman. Or at least a lot less in debt. In fact, I got so annoyed with seeing that on my papers, that one time I wrote an evaluation stating that I might not be a social butterfly but that doesn't imply in any way that I won't advocate for my patients. (I'd just like to add that the response I got was, "Fair enough, this is true. See you guys? Sarah doesn't talk much but when she does it's good. And she gets you extra points on quizzes." Thanks, thanks very much). I wish my instructors (especially the L&D one who told me I'd get eaten alive as a nurse) had seen me yesterday. Not necessarily because I'm proud of what I did, but because sometimes I just like proving people wrong.
Yesterday morning, Ashley, Adam, and I went to the airport and put Leah on a plane for home. I arrived in this country exactly five months ago, and I've never been here without her. It's weird to still be in the same place but have entered into a new season of life. After that, we dropped Adam off to go flying with some people, and then Ashley and I came back to the house. Mark got a call about mid-morning from the MTI clinic that there was a woman in active labor. There were two random things that I prayed for before coming to Haiti in September: that there would be a piano in my house and that I would get to deliver a baby. I can only expect that since I had a keyboard in Saint-Marc, that there is some midwifery in my future as well. So when I heard the words "active labor," all volunteer rotations went out the window. After I was already in scrubs ready to go I asked Ashley if maybe I was a bit overzealous and I should stay back. She said no, and that was all the affirmation I needed.
During our trip out to the clinic (which was longer than necessary because our driver didn't know where we were going even though we've been there like five times and the translator told me he knew where we were going and he didn't), I got about three calls asking how soon we'd be there and if we were comfortable with delivering a baby. I was afraid they were going to try to find someone else to take her if we didn't get there soon. But when we finally got to the clinic, the woman was up walking around with contractions about 15 minutes apart. The person who kept calling me wasn't even at the clinic. Oh Haiti.
Needless to say, we did not get to deliver a baby en route. But her contractions were getting a lot closer together. I wanted to let the volunteers handle it, so they walked her to the gate. Then some sort of commotion ensued. One of the EMTs asked me to come over and see what they were saying (not that I could really tell), so I pushed my way to the front of the crowd. By now, our patient is hunched over trying to breathe and the security guard was yelling at people. Our translator said they weren't going to let her in because they didn't want her husband and sister to come with. I started telling the security guard (for no apparent reason because he didn't understand me), "Okay, well this woman needs to come in right now!" He continued yelling and closed the gate. I start muttering about how I'm just going to do it myself. So I flung open the gate. Security guard freaks out and is trying to close it against me trying to keep it open. Then I start yelling in an attempt to convey to this man that my patient is going to have a baby on the sidewalk. Somehow we end up pushing through, though the security guard shoved the patient's sister out of the way. Then our translator came behind and the security guard tried to stop him. In turn, our translator smacked the security guards arm and there was nearly a fight. This was when I was like, "Shoot...just keep walking, just keep walking..." We always joke around our house about things causing international incidents. As I listened to all the yelling going on behind me while we calmly walked our patient inside, I was afraid that I may have actually been the cause of one.
Later yesterday afternoon, true to form, I began analyzing the situation. I had definitely stood up for my patient and made sure she got the care she really needed, but I probably could've done it in a different way. Was it really necessary for me to start yelling just because everyone else was or try to force my way inside? I can't decide. Either way, I felt  like I needed to apologize to the rest of the volunteers for my temper. It was one of those times where I realize how far I have to go before I'm a calm, wise medical professional instead of a spitfire young gun.
Sidenote, since I've been asked by quite a few people. Yes! I did get to watch the Super Bowl! And it was absolutely glorious. We went back to La Reserve (sadly, no former dictators were sighted this time) and ate really good food. I was harassed because I was not jumping out of my seat or yelling or clapping, but the people sitting around me will attest to the fact that I was squealing and twitching quite a bit. I'm sure I looked special. Such a good game. It brings so much happiness, love, joy, and other fuzzy feelings to my heart that I can't even make any mean comments about the Eagles. At age eight I remember sitting in church drawing pictures of the Packers for my grandpa (as all good little Mennonite girls do), but I don't actually remember watching that Super Bowl. The next year I spent an obscene amount of time arguing with a boy in my class about whether the Pack or the Broncos would win. I finally feel vindicated over that loss. It's a beautiful day.