Surgery Day 1

Starting Monday it was surgery week. If you’ve been reading then you know I didn’t post on those days. The fun part is over and the hard work is in full swing. Too tired to think about blogging. Also when you consider that I am typing on a tiny keyboard and the internet at the hotel in Chinandega was spotty at best, it took a lot of time to blog and post.
Monday we arrived at the hospital at 6:30 am and we had a team meeting. Unfortunately the first bit of news was not good. One of the children we had screened had died overnight. I have never been on a mission in which a child had died and it was definitely not a good way to start. The child was 14 months old. He had not had surgery. He started running a fever the night before in the shelter and the team pediatrician sent him to the hospital, started him on antibiotics, etc. He took a turn for the worse and died during the night. We don’t know why or what he had. So very sad.
After the team meeting the medical personnel practiced a mock code in the OR and the rest of us went to our respective areas. About 4 kids got taken off of the surgery schedule because they were sick, but 27 children were still given new smiles on Monday. Everyone came out of surgery well. I didn’t have much to do in speech therapy world on Monday because all but two of the surgeries were cleft lips. A cleft lip doesn’t affect speech and most of the children were infants anyway. Since I didn’t have much happening, I helped out where I could. I folks. I did have to screen a couple of latecomers and I did an evaluation and some parent training with the waitress from the beach who brought her son in. Turns out he’s just a late talker. I had a really good translator helping me with him. Our translators are groups of students from the International schools (American-Nicaraguan) in Managua and Chinandega and they are members of Operation Smile clubs at their schools. They are very helpful!
I finally found a good way to keep busy in the afternoon. I was a baby wrangler and baby whisperer in the recovery room. The nurses needed to get vitals, chart, and all of that stuff, but some of the babies are very agitated and combative coming out of anesthesia. The student volunteers were scared of hurting the babies or didn’t know how to hold them. I am used to manhandling kids when I need to so I held several bucking, screaming kids as their blood pressure was taken or even when a new IV was started. I also got to cuddle and love on them—my favorite part. The cool thing about being in recovery is that I get to see the mamas come in and see their babies and their new smiles for the first time. The moms are so relieved that their babies came out of surgery okay and usually delighted with the result. Of course by this time I was already tired and my emotions were at the surface, so I cried right along with the mamas.
I spent the rest of the day in recovery and left the hospital at 7:30 pm—a 13 hour day. I was too tired to even think about eating, plus I had to go ahead and pack everything to leave straight from the hospital on Tuesday. After being covered with drool, urine, blood, and other assorted body fluids from the babies, plus being so sweaty myself (temps in the mid 90s, no a/c) I took the best shower of my life when I got back to the hotel and then to bed around 10:30. The long days and early mornings are catching up to me.