Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [48]
There was a chiropractor with an adjustment table who liked kids and others looking on while he cracked necks and spines.
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I had an Ambu breathing bag with a full set of pediatric masks. I shoved two desks together to make an exam table. I had solutions to clean wounds, antibiotic ointments, sterile gauze and triangular bandages for slings, IV catheters and solutions, a stash of IV antibiotics, and five hundred 3x75-inch index cards. I was going to make out a card for every patient I saw. If I had managed to keep up with the index-card idea, five hundred wouldn’t have been enough.
An internist who had been on an earlier trip said that virtually all the children would be malnourished and infested with parasites and that we should worm them all, but the kids playing in the school yard looked healthy and well nourished.
It was late Sunday afternoon by the time we had things set up and ready to go. Patients would start lining up at seven the next morning, and we would start seeing them at about eight. We boarded our sweltering hot chartered bus and waited to be driven back to the resort.
Tela and the surrounding towns were plastered with posters announcing the clinic. A charter bus company was planning to run buses from La Ceiba, sixty miles east. What we didn’t know, because none of us had seen the posters, was that every patient was expected to make a contribution of one lempira, about forty cents, for each doctor they saw.
That night we had a meeting in the same room where three weeks earlier the presidents of several Central American countries had worked out a peace plan that was unacceptable to the United States. You had to go up ten steps to reach the podium, reminding me of the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford from Moby-Dick.
The first speaker was Lorenzo James, a midsized dentist from Texas dressed in battle fatigues with surgical tubing, Kelly and straight clamps, and several sizes of needle holders hanging from his double-punched black leather and steel eyelet belt.
“How does that surgical equipment stay sterile out in the field?” I asked Max.
“Without him this trip wouldn’t be possible,” said Max. “He’s the president and founder of the Foundation for Medical and Dental Care for Central America.” President George H. W. Bush had declared Lorenzo James a Point of Light.
Along with the clinic at Escuela John F. Kennedy there would be a mobile unit that went out into the bush, as they called it, with two Land Rovers. They would set up in remote village squares and take care of whoever needed taking care of, sleeping in the homes of villagers and moving on when they ran out of patients.
Among the positive attributes of the Honduran people cited by Lorenzo James was their deep gratitude for the help we were bringing, their hospitality, and the fact that they bled less and required less pain medication than patients in the United States. The germs in Honduras were less likely to be antibiotic-resistant, so small doses of penicillin usually did the trick. The children were very brave and rarely cried. James told a joke about malpractice insurance.
The next speaker was Dr. Sandor Martinez, the chief of service and only surgeon at the local hospital and commissioner of public health for Tela and the surrounding area. It was under his auspices that we would be practicing. He would arrange follow-up care for anything we thought needed follow-up. He mentioned that the local doctors and dentists weren’t thrilled with our presence. It had never occurred to me that there were local doctors.
“The Hondurans are a very conservative and dignified people. Please don’t wear shorts except in the resort compound. Please don’t pull any more than four teeth from any one patient. You don’t know what happens when you leave. Some of these patients bleed and bleed and we can’t transfuse them.”
Three teachers from the school, one of whom