Two New Lives

Yesterday, I saw my first baby being born! It was a caesarean section. One difference was that it was transverse instead of longitudinal. (That means they cut up and down instead of horizontally like they normally do in the US). It was pretty cool to see a baby being born. I was kind of standing somewhat far away because I don't have any medical school clinical experience and watching, but they were really good about letting me know what was going on and I could see pretty much everything. The other girl in my group got to help right there which is pretty cool. Maybe if I do something like this after my fourth year, I'll be able to do more hands-on stuff. Other than that, nothing very notable happened that I can remember.

Today, I saw a vaginal birth. Here, they pretty much cut an episiotomy for all of the births. This is contrary to what is common practice in the US. They used they used to do this before, but now they don't unless it is absolutely necessary. Well, in Mexico it is still common practice. To be honest, this was a really traumatic experience for me. Apparently, the woman was having a hard time pushing, but honestly, it wasn't that bad. The other girl in my program who is a 3rd resident said that she's seen much worse and probably could have done it with some coaching. Well, the anesthesiologist decided it would be a good idea to start pressing on the woman's stomach like compressions...... yeah not really that cool. It was pretty traumatic. And on top of that they cut a huge episiotomy. The baby was healthy though, and the woman seemed ok at the end, but still. Another thing that I saw was a spontaneous abortion where the doctor went in to scrape the uterus to make sure to remove everything. He let me aid with that so that was pretty cool.

I don't know if I mentioned that Pochutla is the farthest clinical site that we go to because it is 1 1/2 hour away by bus. It kind of stinks to have to walk 1/2 hour to the bus stop and ride for 1.5 hour and then do the same on the way back, but luckily we only do that this week. Other than that, I really like this hosp ital and wouldn't mind spending more time there.

Spanish class again. same time. This time we worked on subjuntive. I'm pretty rusty on some parts of it, so I'm glad that we're going over it again. It makes me think more about it when I speak and I want to get to the point again where I don't have to think about it.

Immediately after, we went to Restaurante Liza's which is the place that we've been going to pretty much every day at 5pm. It's really chill and the bartender Andrés is a really good guy. Apparently, he's a hardcore firefighter in Alaska. Interesting. It's a really nice place to hang out and meet new people. Today I talked to some Australian girls that were traveling all over Latin America because they just finished university (sounds like me ^^). There are other people that I'm starting to recognize, which is not hard in a somewhat small town like this.