Hola from Siquirres, Costa Rica! This week I’m not in the usual San Jose, as Santiago and I are on a work trip with Meditek. We’re doing corrective and preventative maintenance at Centro de Atencion Integral en Salud (CAIS), another hospital in Costa Rica. Here’s a recap of the week!
On Sunday, we were still in San Jose, so a few of us went to a local butterfly garden to spend some time in the sun before it inevitably started raining. There were so many beautiful, different species of butterflies and plants, which I’ll feature down below. We also went on a mini-hike on a trail at the butterfly garden, and saw lots of foliage and even an iguana! On the way back, a butterfly landed on my shoulder, which equally scared and excited me. Overall, I’d definitely recommend taking a trip to the butterfly garden — just don’t wear white shorts and shoes like I did :). It was nice to come across some nature in the middle of a gigantic city. After our mini excursion, we stopped by October Six Cafe right by the hostel and had some refreshing food and drinks. For dinner, we made a chicken, tomato, and onion stew with some rice and guacamole in the hostel kitchen.
Butterfly at the garden!
GMI Family Dinner!
Monday morning, Santiago and I were picked up to leave for Siquirres around 8am to arrive at 11am. The ride through the mountains was really pretty and featured some great views. We ate a casado at a local restaurant with our coworkers for lunch, and then headed over to the hospital to do some work. Since CAIS is more remote than the hospitals we’ve visited in San Jose, it seemed a lot less crowded, leaving room for us to work on vacant beds. The technology here is also a bit different from what we saw last week — the Hill-Rom beds are an older model, making it a bit easier to diagnose problems since there aren’t as many accessories that can break in comparison to the newer models. The anesthesia machines are different too. At Hospital Calderon Guardia, we had to almost completely take them apart, interchange parts between machines, clean them, and run calibration tests. At CAIS, one of the machines that we saw cannot be fully taken apart, and the only thing you can really change is the air filter. However, we did still run calibration and leak tests to make sure that it was functioning properly.
On Tuesday, we once again went to CAIS to clean and check the functionality of the beds. Since there were a lot of patients in the morning using the beds, we weren’t able to get through all of them, and therefore drove to an outpatient clinic about 40 minutes away. On the way there and back, we passed one of the Chiquitas banana farms and saw tons of banana and plantain trees (pictured!). At the outpatient center, we had to take a look at one of the fetal monitors that wasn’t working properly. Before today, I didn’t realize that there is a separate machine from an ECG that detects the vitals of both fetus and mother, so it was cool to see the device without any prior knowledge.
Plantain trees on the way to outpatient clinic
Wednesday was basically just a filling-out-reports-on-machines day, and Thursday we made the trek back to San Jose, with a stop in Cartago to see the Basilica de los Angeles and Las Ruinas de Cartago, both of which were beautiful. It feels good to be back at Selina with the GMI crew again! Tomorrow I’ll be going to Hospital del Trauma for work and then we’re all going to Manuel Antonio this weekend to hang out at the beach.
Las Ruinas de Cartago
Basilica de Los Angeles in Cartago
Stay tuned for more updates, hasta luego!