Hospital del IESS

Monday was my first day at Hospital del IESS or (Instituto Ecuadoriano de Seguro Social). I’ll be working there for 2 weeks until rotating to some different clinics/hospitals. It’s a pretty big hospital with 21 departments.

I was down in the emergency room working with a bunch of 1^st year interns and an attending. Here they do med school straight out of high school (as most other countries do), I think it’s 6 or 7 years, but the final year is intern year, and they do 30 hour shifts the whole year. Eek.

The patients we saw were kind of a mixed bag. The hospital is the equivalent of a Level 2 trauma center, but we still manage to see some trauma. Some interesting cases I saw:

Here's a lady who unfortunately sustained 2^nd degree burns to her hands and face during a gas explosion of her stove (this happens quite frequently here).

I saw a man with lung cancer (who did not know he had lung cancer, as the family had decided not to tell him.) with new onset dyspnea. Here’s his x-ray.

That’s bad.

There was this other man with a ridiculous amount of earwax (that ball floating in the tray is only part of what we got out…)

And then there was a metal worker who came in with a corneal abrasion. But they don't use fluorescence here, and we did not have a slit lamp, and we didn’t CT him to make sure there were no metal fragments in the eye. But I think we referred him to an ophthalmologist (oftalmólogo- I like that word). Otherwise we did a lot of wound examinations, lots of skin infections and burns, and of course saw lots of broken bones.

In the afternoon I headed to my first day of Spanish class, little did I know that it was going to be one of the heaviest rainstorms Riobamba has seen in years!

The streets literally looked like rushing rivers and most of the taxis refused to take any passengers while the buses attempted to ford the rivers. My host sister’s boyfriend’s car actually was lifted from the ground and sustained water damage to the point where it wouldn’t start. Craziness!

I was soaked despite my rain jacket and umbrella by the time we finally got a fake cab to take us. Afterwards, I ended up at El Restaurante de San Valentín because it was el Día de San Valentín with some friends, it just seemed appropriate.

The next day it cleared up a bit.

One thing I love about Riobamba is that whatever direction you look, you can see mountains.

Here’s some random graffiti, which I thought was pretty awesome...

Until Next Time!
Margaret