Hi everyone, I have an eventful week to tell you about! Let’s start with the huge group of clowns that Emily and I saw downtown! On Sunday, Emily and I walked to the municipal crafts market for some souvenir shopping. Along the way, we saw a group of people dressed in clown costumes standing outside a fast food restaurant called Ticoburguesas. They left just as we were passing the doorway, so we ended up walking together with their group. One of the clowns honked his horn and Emily and I burst out laughing. The “head clown” who was leading the group turned around to see these two obvious tourists walking with her group, so we started chatting for a bit. It turns out they had just finished a training program that permits them to visit hospitals and cheer up the sick patients. How funny is that! Here we are learning about the health system in Costa Rica, and we meet some other people who are also getting involved in healthcare, but in a very different way. Maybe I’ll see them at Hospital Nacional de Niños one of these days.
Bubble tea in Barrio Chino
This week at work, Pablo and I continued shadowing Dr. Bogantes as he met with his patients. We observed one situation that was the result of poor design and usability testing. As Dr. Bogantes was reviewing the file of a young girl with epilepsy, he noticed a note that said the mother had syphilis. He asked the patient’s mother about it, and she was very confused. As far as she knew neither she nor her husband had ever had syphilis, and she never received any treatment or counseling about it during her pregnancy. Dr. Bogantes reviewed the paper booklet of lab tests she had with her, and we tracked down the confusion to a misinterpretation of the results. In the booklet’s list of tests and results, it says the name of the test, then has three boxes – Yes, No, and Result. Someone had circled the “Yes,” but then wrote a negative sign in the box for results. We suspect the person who documented the results meant “Yes, the test has been completed and the result was negative,” but someone else misinterpreted that to mean “Yes, this patient has syphilis.” How unfortunate is that! The nurse who was assisting joked that mistakes like that can tear apart families if there’s an argument about where this disease came from, and she’s absolutely right!
Later in the week, we observed heart surgeries on some very young patients. These patients were all born with some sort of heart defect that was affecting the way the blood was flowing to their lungs or the rest of their bodies. For one patient, we saw a stent being placed in order to close a hole that was preventing blood from flowing to both lungs. After the stent was placed, the surgeons used an angiogram to confirm that they could now see blood flowing to both lungs equally. The angiograms were so cool! We could see the exact flow of blood in a real-time video, and see the way it branches through all the small vessels in the lungs, like the branches of a tree.
Beautiful view from our Airbnb
This weekend we did some nice hiking. We were thinking of doing a hike at the Poás volcano, so we rented an Airbnb in Naranjo Friday night, but in the end we decided we weren’t physically prepared to take on this hike. We didn’t have proper hiking shoes, or gloves, or a heavy jacket and hat for the cold we would have felt at the top of the volcano. We came back to San José and some of us went to Hacienda La Chimba today instead. We hiked a much more manageable 9 km and stopped along the way for some fun pictures. Check them out throughout the post!
