Hello again from Costa Rica, this is the end of my third week living in this beautiful country. So far has been three weeks of meeting new people and experiences. This week was exciting because I had my first road trip with Meditek to Sequirres, a city close to the Atlantic part of the country. Our trip started Monday when Maria Jose and Daniel, field engineers for Meditek, picked us up from the hotel. The drive wasn’t too bad, was only three hours but a lot of curves which made me dizzy at times. We got to stay in a hotel 10 min from the hospital which was very nice and convenient. Sequirres is a very hot place so having a room with good AC was very useful. After getting to the hotel, we went to have lunch in a restaurant called La Castellana where I ate rice and beans, one of the main dishes of the Area. Then, we went to the hospital to do preventive Mantainance to the beds in the emergency and hospitalization areas. Most of the beds in Sequirres were older versions of the Hill Rom smart beds which made the preventive mantainance very simple. Most of the beds had problems with the controllers probably because of the humidity the electric connections get damage.
On Tuesday, we went to the surgery rooms to do mantainance to the anesthesia machines. Learning last week about anesthesia machines helped a lot because I was ready to help more the engineers. So far, anesthesia machine have been the most challenging equipment to use so far as it is very hard to figure out the causes of a leakage in the circuit. However, being in hospitals and doing mantainance have give me a new perspective of what is needed from a biomedical engineer. We also got to visit another hospital in which María José taught us how to use a fetal heart rate monitor which was very cool. Furthermore, Wednesday was the busiest day of the week as we had to finish all the beds because we had to leave Thursday morning. We divided tasks between Emily and me which made everything faster. At the end, we couldn’t check three beds because they had critical patients that we were not allowed to move.
Thursday, we came back to San José with Emily and the engineers. We took a longer road that had a lot of curves that made Emily and me feel very dizzy. In our way back, we stop in a city called Cartago which used to be the capital city of Costa Rica years ago. María José showed us the church and the Virgin Marry sanctuary which was very beautiful and reminded me a lot about my mom. After visiting Cartago we ended our road trip back in Selina with Emily. Furthermore, Friday was a very relaxing day as we just went to work half day because there was no bed availability in the Trauma Hospital. I’m looking forward for next week as I am going to be traveling to San Carlos for another road trip with Mediteck.
