Operacion Sunrisa Days 2 and 3

Yesterday I was too exhausted to update. We got up at 4 and we on the bus by 5. Our bus broke down about 30 minutes down the road and we had to wait for a new one and transfer all of our luggage. It took 7 hours to reach Santa Rosa. We were miserable on the bus ride because it was freezing and they had the air on full blast. We finally got them to turn it off.
My seatmate for the trip was Pam, the pediatrician. It´s an interesting group because we have 2 Pams, 2 Eileens, 2 Kathys (and 1 Katherine), 2 Lindas, and 2 Michis...crazy! I enjoyed talking to the other Pam about books, medical ethics, what peds learn about speech and language development, and everything in between.
We got to the hospital at about 2 and started screening at 3. We screening 58 patients that day. I was one of the last ones finished and got back to the hotel at 9:15 pm, having been up since 4. I never even ate supper and was too tired to think about eating...or blogging. I took a shower, ate a pack of cheese crackers, and went to bed.
This hotel in Santa Rosa is not quite as nice as the one in Tegucigalpa (an understatement!) I am rooming with Kathy, another pre-post op nurse from New Jersey. We have a double bed and a single and we barely have any room for our luggage. There is no dresser or closet, so we will quite literally be living out of our suitcases for the next week. That won´t matter too much since I will be wearing the same clothes all week as I am very ill-prepared for the weather. The internet said that it would be in the 70s and 80s, but it is pretty consistently staying in the 50s and is very damp. We are all having a hard time staying warm since we all mostly brought capris and T-shirts. We were all very cold last night and Kathy and I did get extra blankets for tonight. There is no heat in our rooms. We are also on the first floor and have a window with no covering on our shower. Really nice. Plus we have one outlet in our room. We moved my bed about 2 inches from the wall to plug in hair dryers and couldn´t open the door this morning. Crazy!
Today we screening 11 more kids. There are 52 scheduled for surgery and the goal was 100. As of now, surgery is only scheduled Mon-Wed and was supposed to go through Friday. Looks like we´ll gave lots of free time. I´ve gotten some great pictures of kids and gotten to see a few really interesting ones, including one with a partial facial cleft and a little guy with the most severe hypertelorism that I´ve ever seen. Our first kiddo today had scabies, so I´m a little paranoid about that, but I wore gloves and have been using antibacterial gel like crzay. We were finished by 1 today, so six of us walked around town and had coffee at a really neat coffee shop. The town is pretty boring on a whole and there is not much to do here. The shops were junky and we have seen no souvenirs yet.
Went back to the hospital at 4 for the posting of the list of who gets surgery and when. It´s so neat to see the faces of the parents light up when their child´s name is called. Even the older kids get really excited about being selected for surgery because they know it will change their lives. The only kids who don´t get selected are the ones who are too young, too involved (and they be seen locally later), or are sick (heart murmur, pneumonia, etc.). After that we came back and tried to nap, but this horrible band was practicing right outside of our window...the same 3 measures again and again, but at different times and not together at all for 45 minutes. Then, they finally played a song. It was horribly obnoxious! Hope it´s quite tonight, but from the sound of things that will not be the case. Thank goodness for earplugs.
We all went to dinner tonight at 7 and didn´t get out food until after 9. Yep, Honduras is just like Nicaragua in that regard. By the time our food came most of us weren´t even hungry anymore. We just back back to the hotel at 10:15 and some were going to a disco tonight. While it would have been fun, I´m still exhausted from the week of my defense and I need one more night of good sleep before I´m game to do anything late at night. Tomorrow we have a fair amount of travel to and from the Copan ruins for our sightseeing day and then we hit the ground running with surgery on Monday.