Blog 3

   Friday was our last day of clinicals.  I spent the morning in the ICU at the Hospital El Vigia, which is a social security hospital.  It was much more modern and cleaner than any of the places I had been to so far.    I didn't really get to do anything hands-on, but we were able to talk quite a bit with the nurses.  They showed us how they chart of these giant paper forms.  We spent quite a bit reading over their forms along with the patient histories.  In other words, we worked on our language skills more than doing any patient care which was fine by me.  The nurses there work only 6 hour shifts and they share patients.  There are no specific patient assignments for each nurse.  On the regular floors, each nurse works 8 hour shifts and can have as many as 16 patients.  We also got to compare nursing responsibilities between the U.S. and Panama.  Here, the nurses do the blood cultures, insert foleys, and draw blood as needed.  In Panama, the doctors are the ones who perform these tasks.  While trying to explain our responsibilities, it seemed as if we do much less actual patient care in the U.S. because we spend so much time documenting to the nth degree in detail.  We spend the majority of our time covering our own butts in case a patient sues us while the Panamanians spend a tremendous amount of time on patient education and prevention.  I was astounded at how much time Panamanian nurses AND doctors spend with their patients.  They are very very thorough and take their time with everything.  It makes me wonder how we have all this technology in the U.S. but a developing country is outperforming us in direct patient care.  I envy their culture and their way of life.
   After clinicals were over, we returned home to get showered and cleaned so that we could attend a fundraising event for the local reinas carnaval.  Well, it turned out that there was no running water in our house!  We called Mariela and she explained to us that no one in Chitre had water at the moment and that it would come back on at some point later in the day.  To a house of 6 girls that needed to get dressed up, that spelled disaster!  Thankfully, the water did return in time for us to shower.  We all danced at the fundraiser and were looking for another place to continue our night, so we all got cabs to ride over to a club called Break...which ended up being closed.  From there we walked next door to the Fiesta Casino, which had no dancing.  Bleh!  We ended up eating dinner there and called it a night.

   After getting up early all week long, I still managed to get up early one last time to finish packing and to help clean our house.  We had a very long bus ride back to Panama City ahead of us.  Mariela came by and hung out with us until the bus arrived.  I had an absolutely wonderful time in Panama and was sad to go.  I would love to work there someday, although I'm not quite sure how I would swing that lol.  I am at least determine to return someday and will definitely keep in touch with all my new friends!