My year as a rotating intern at the Franklin Tello Hospital in Esmeraldas was a wasted year in my medical studies, since the professors I had were the worst of the worst, except for Dr. Walter Caicedo, a pediatrician who recently graduated from his postgraduate course. at the Central University of Quito. The situation was so critical that the two operating rooms did not work for 6 months because they had been contaminated, and could not be decontaminated. Patients requiring surgery were taken to private clinics, where doctors from this hospital operated on them and billed the patient and the government. the same happened with the medical exams, the X-rays, and even the medicines that the patients had to buy, generally in the private pharmacies of the hospital doctors or their friends.
The shifts were 30 hours, spending one day, two, and sometimes three times a week. In my free time, I would visit Jackson Maldonado, my friend whom I met in Quito, and his sister, with whom I fell in love until we got married, a few months after meeting on August 30, and the ecclesiastical wedding was September 4, 1982, 40 years ago.
I still think she made a crazy decision, as she had much better matches than me, and the one competing with me at the time was a young Greek captain, from one of the biggest oil tankers, showering her with gifts. She says that she chose me because I fooled her and because she didn't want to leave the country.
The day of the wedding was tragic. We did it in Esmeraldas. My parents, brothers, and friends were traveling from Quito, but on a bridge passing Quinindé they had an accident, one of my friends was thrown forward from the bed of the truck, dying. He was from Manabí, that same day of the wedding, some of my friends were taking the corpse to his family in that province.
I had the hard decision to stop the wedding or continue, and I decided to continue. We celebrate the wedding. We went to spend our wedding night in Tonsupa, first in a humble room and then in a hotel.
Every weekend we would go to Esmeraldas to be with the family. In the town, I took care of the patients in the morning, and in the afternoon I went from house to house visiting them, asking them about their health, verifying their living conditions, ask them about medicinal plants and local foods, since I had committed myself to my professor of Medical Psychology, Eduardo Estrella, whose teaching assistant I was at the Central University, Eduardo Estrella, who had been director of the National Institute of Nutrition and was writing a book about his research on native American foods, which even led him to research in Spain at the Archivo de Indias, during his sabbatical year.
Meanwhile, in the Hurtado government, things went from bad to worse. There was no state investment, in the fields there was no drinking water, sewerage, or environmental sanitation, so they were more serious sources of infection. in which malaria, tetanus, polyparasitosis, diarrhea claimed the lives of children, youth, and adults.
To face this health catastrophe, the work of rural doctors was insufficient. The OCAME Peasant Organization had trained health promoters since 1972. As a medical student, I participated during one of my vacations as a parasitology instructor, in a course at the farm in Puerto Nuevo, in which I arrived by boat on the Río Dirty. The workshop was with an Italian volunteer doctor named Mauricio. Mattei. This workshop was the one that inspired me to want to return, and work with the OCAME Health Promoters and the fathers of Liberation Theology Graciano and Julián.
Graciano went up the rivers loaded with medicines, they also had a pharmacy in Muisne, with donated and purchased medicines.
In the month of October, the rains began. A curtain of water fell from the roof of the dispensary every day, the river flowed down with trees, and the fishermen helped to pull the cows carried by the current to the sea. In the town, the houses that were on pillars were filled with roots, and even snakes carried by the current, which also destroyed almost half of the houses that were close to the shore or the beach.
A girl was bitten by a snake X, which causes disseminated vascular coagulation, we did not have antivenom serum in the sub-center, so we took her on a stretcher running along the beach and to avoid the cliff between Cabo and Bunche the peasants did acrobatics. When we arrived at the Muisne hospital, they did not have anti-venom serum either, so we used coagulants and antihistamines, finally, a snake-eater saved her with shots, she lost the muscles of her little leg that was left deformed, where she was already sweating blood.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario