Laurie and I are both exhausted from a long day, eleven hours, at the hospital! We started around 7 am with a lovely breakfast ( hot dogs and black beans) in the OR area. I barely recognized the doctors and nurses with their scrubs and hats on ready for surgery. JP, one of the ENT's, and Rod where dressed in "care bears" scrubs (quite a departure from the standard blues or greens seen in most operating rooms).
We quickly became very busy in the audiology clinic early this morning and got backed up with all the audiograms we needed to perform. We are getting better at performing the tests faster when you have the pressure of sixty people waiting, Hearing tests can take less than ten minutes or more than 30 if you need to do bone conduction tests. Early morning we had many little children which can be very difficult to test. It was sad and shocking to see how hard of hearing so many young people are.
In the afternoon the hearing aid side of the clinic became very busy. Many of those we had given audiograms to were returning after seeing the doctor to be fit for a hearing aid. I really had some learning to do! We use donated molds and try to match the patients ear to a mold. It is a tricky trial and error procedure. After trying countless molds on this lovely young teenage boy to no avail we had to make him one. Laurie showed me while she made it. Sort of a silly putty experience complete with drills and tubing. Pretty impressive actually. We then attach a hearing aid to the mold. Seems last year they had a wonderful donation of new hearing aids to distribute. This year we just have old, but working, hearing aids. A total of 124. It is a little more difficult having to figure out the mechanics of each of the hearing aids. We are anxiously awaiting a delivery of donated batteries as we are in very short supply of the most commonly used one. Laurie purchased all the hearing aid batteries in Antigua! I hope the batteries arrive soon. Fitting hearing aids without batteries would be impossible.
I got a lot of hugs today from very grateful people who now have improved hearing! And hugs from mothers whose children we had helped. As a mother myself this was very emotional, as I imagined how they must be feeling. We also met this wonderful little boy, about ten, who spent the whole day with his grandmother as her interpreter. She was very hard of hearing but he knew how to communicate with her. He was so cute and tried to learn a little English from us! They had travelled 4 hours to come to the clinic and we learned he was without a mother and his father was being operated on later this week by one of our surgeons.
Thank heavens for Lavinia our interpreter who is Mexican, married a Canadian, and works in a hospital in northern BC with one of the anesthetists (Hazleton,BC?) Also I met three wonderful Guatemalan kids, all juniors (grade 11), Peter, Chantal and Sophia who came after school today to help as interpreters. They all spoke perfect english! I so wished Courtney could be here to met them and share in the experience. I think they will be back tomorrow and hopefully I can connect Courtney to them.
We finished our day by going to cafe mediterranean for pasta, then to Luna Miel, for dessert crepes and coffee. Lavinia joined us and we ran into another 6 of the group at dinner. Happily we are back at our casita and ready to sleep!
We had planned to go to a free salsa class at 5 today but didn't finish at the clinic til 6. Hopefully tomorrow we will have an after work activity that doesn't just involve eating.
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