The Hospital

In Peru, medical school starts after high school and lasts seven years. You have to take an exam and pass with a certain percentage to get in, but there's no such thing as undergraduate education before medical school. With this in mind, I've been introducing myself as an American medical student, in my third of eight years. I also give the disclaimer that I'm in the "general sciences" part of my education, and I haven't started the practical part yet, so no one thinks I'm capable of actually taking care of patients on my own.

The doctors, nurses, and technicians at Huarmey Hospital accept me right away. Most of them are very patient and take time to explain interesting cases to me and show me what they're doing. They also invite me to do exams myself, especially with pregnant women (feeling where the baby is located inside the mother, detecting heartbeats, doing internal exams). Because I can't understand everything, I write down key words and look up the illnesses when I get home. It can be really frustrating to see a sick patient and then not know what's wrong with him or how he's being treated, but I do my best to ask questions and realize that I will not always know how they are being answered.

Besides the language difference, the hardest part about being in the hospital is that it moves very slowly. I work in the emergency/obstetrics/long term care wing, which means that we occasionally get lots of excitement when a car accident victim or a woman in labor comes in, but often there are few patients to observe. For example, yesterday I spent seven hours with one woman in labor and helped with the delivery, which was exciting and traumatic and fascinating (this experience deserves its own blog post). Today, Sunday, there were two patients in five hours. I'm finding that just about every patient that is admitted has something to teach me. I only wish there were more sick people in this city.