Another week in Limon! Our main focus this week was to conduct preventative maintenance on 15+ incubators. This maintenance includes calibration, checking every part’s functionality, and cleaning. I was taught how to run the calibration so that was my role for each one including cleaning.
Inside of the incubator and the voltage reader
On Wednesday I went on a little road trip with Daniel to a town in the southern caribbean area called Pandora. The drive was through the jungle and along the beach so the views were really pretty and it was also fun to learn more about Daniel. We started working on a Steris surgery table and checking to make sure all of the controller buttons were working. There was an issue with the button that tilted it to the right and it caused the controller to disconnect. We took it apart and tried reconnecting the control boards but nothing was working. Eventually, we decided that a new controller needed to be ordered. After that we ran checks on an ecg machine and then went back to Limon.
Inside of the controller, surgery table, and blood pressure monitor
We went to a clinic and replaced the screen and control board in some blood pressure cuff monitors. Afterwards we went back to the main hospital in Limon to work on more incubators. One of them kept alarming that there was a temperature probe failure so we swapped out the sensor from a different incubator. It still didn’t work so then we moved on to checking the wires and switching them. There was still an error even after switching the control board so we had to note the incubator as out of service. We continued the preventative maintenance on three more incubators.
(left) temperature and humidity probe sensors
Thursday we ended up finishing all of our work so after filling out all of the reports, we drove back to San Jose. On Friday, I met Emanual at Hospital San Rafael. We went to the cardiology department to run tests on ten GE SEER 1000 devices. These are used to record a patient’s heartbeat for 48 hours. After transferring the data to the computer software, we ran simulations to make sure they were reading properly.
Things I learned
- The calibration of the incubators includes reading various voltage levels and adjusting the values on the device to make sure they match
- The controller on the surgery table is connected through bluetooth
- The CardioDay software that is connected with the SEER 1000 can interpret where there are discrepancies in the patient’s heartbeat.
- Mochi is made out of red beans and glutinous rice flour!
This weekend we stayed in San Jose. For lunch on Saturday, Jade, Jamali and I went to a ramen restaurant. I got the spicy pork guksu which tasted really good but the broth was way too spicy for me. That night I had a girls night with Jade, Summan, and Aiman. We had face masks and watched a Taiwanese movie called Someday or One Day. It involved time travel so after we all had to debrief on our theories.
On Sunday we had a potluck so Jade and I spent the day prepping. I made brazilian cocada which consists of condensed milk, butter, and ground coconut. Jade wanted to make mochi which was no easy feat. After cooking the beans and making the red bean paste, we had to make the outer mochi layer. We had very limited resources so we had to get creative but it was so much fun to make! We used ziploc bags as our parchment paper and then a cup as a rolling pin. Then everyone brought their food over and we got to try everything! I can’t believe there are only 2 weeks left :/
