Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Whoa, Blogger is in Spanish. Right now I'm creando una entrada. Anyway. A brief tale: every Mon, Tue and Wed morning from 9-12 I go to the Instituto Nacionál de las Sciencas Médicas y Nutricion to work on my research project. This involves a long, long bus-train-extravangaza into the south of the city (I leave about 7:30.) Monday was my first attempt making it alone, which went well until I got off the subway and caught a bus, which dropped me off somewhere I'd never seen before. So I went up to a woman and asked her where the Institute was, and she turned out to be going there too and asked if I wanted to come with, so I said sure and she hailed a taxi and we were there in two minutes. My first random stranger encounter: very pleasant.
Then I went up to the lab. The doctor I'm working with most directly had clinical duties that morning so I followed him to a little conference room where he and about five interns discussed all the patients in that ward, in very rapid Spanish, for about three hours. I felt like a total idiot: my Spanish was especially bad because I hadn't spoken much that weekend (spent much of it hanging with my roommates, and even the church we found was English-speaking). So the doctor asked me what year of medical school I was in and I was like, "Uh... no soy... I am not in medical school." So then he was like, oh that's why you don't know anything (well I imagine he was like that) and he benignly ignored me for the rest of the morning.
There was a brief, exciting emergency: as we were sitting around a nurse came in and said "something something something!" and all six doctors (and me trailing behind) got up and ran down the hall. Whoa! Exciting! One of the patients was kind of freaking out. He was a huge, bald, tattooed* man with a long cut down his chest - I found out later that they'd just removed a lung tumor.
*I didn't get close enough to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure his knuckles were tattooed with R O C K.
He was trying to get out of bed and saying "Por favor! Por favor! Me voy a morir! [I'm going to die!] No quiero matar! [I don't want to kill!*]" All the doctors were gathered around the bed, saying Tranquilate [calm down] and trying to figure out what his problem was. He kept begging for oxygen, which makes sense because he had a lung tumor, but didn't make sense because the whole time he had an oxygen mask strapped to his face. At one point one of the doctors detached the tube from the mask to see if he'd even notice (he didn't); the escaping oxygen plumed in the air like the exhaust of a truck.
**at which point I was like, whoa, de acuerdo dude.
So, they took some blood and then we all left and we went back to discussing acronyms that I did not understand.
In other news, yesterday night I hemmed my pants and ate stewed cactus fruit (not good.)
Then I went up to the lab. The doctor I'm working with most directly had clinical duties that morning so I followed him to a little conference room where he and about five interns discussed all the patients in that ward, in very rapid Spanish, for about three hours. I felt like a total idiot: my Spanish was especially bad because I hadn't spoken much that weekend (spent much of it hanging with my roommates, and even the church we found was English-speaking). So the doctor asked me what year of medical school I was in and I was like, "Uh... no soy... I am not in medical school." So then he was like, oh that's why you don't know anything (well I imagine he was like that) and he benignly ignored me for the rest of the morning.
There was a brief, exciting emergency: as we were sitting around a nurse came in and said "something something something!" and all six doctors (and me trailing behind) got up and ran down the hall. Whoa! Exciting! One of the patients was kind of freaking out. He was a huge, bald, tattooed* man with a long cut down his chest - I found out later that they'd just removed a lung tumor.
*I didn't get close enough to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure his knuckles were tattooed with R O C K.
He was trying to get out of bed and saying "Por favor! Por favor! Me voy a morir! [I'm going to die!] No quiero matar! [I don't want to kill!*]" All the doctors were gathered around the bed, saying Tranquilate [calm down] and trying to figure out what his problem was. He kept begging for oxygen, which makes sense because he had a lung tumor, but didn't make sense because the whole time he had an oxygen mask strapped to his face. At one point one of the doctors detached the tube from the mask to see if he'd even notice (he didn't); the escaping oxygen plumed in the air like the exhaust of a truck.
**at which point I was like, whoa, de acuerdo dude.
So, they took some blood and then we all left and we went back to discussing acronyms that I did not understand.
In other news, yesterday night I hemmed my pants and ate stewed cactus fruit (not good.)
Comments:
Post a Comment
