Nicaragua: Day 2

Day two: March first

He was holding up what looked like a giant electric toothbrush. “This” my father said, “is the vaginal probe.” I was sitting in the back of a dimly lit clinic watching my father holding a pose of a slightly more masculine and promiscuous statue of liberty.

We were at the clinic to deliver an ultrasound machine to a small town in the middle of Nicaragua. My father, gesticulating wildly with several different instruments, was here to teach the Nicaraguan doctors how to see inside people without using a scalpel. Old habits die hard. But then again, so do patients.

I’ll back it up quick to earlier this morning. I woke up at about 6:00 and showered in under the lukewarm hose that passed for a shower. Nicaraguans seem to take things pretty literally. If a menu says steak you get a slab of meat. If a sign warns of a steep hill you had better expect a near vertical climb. If a it’s called a shower you will get pelted by a shower of rainwater coming out of a spout. Anyway, we ate a breakfast of tortillas and rice. We met with a member of the Rainbow Network who explained to us what we would be doing with all of the medicine we brought. First we had to convince the government to allow us to treat their citizens.

We went to the local ministry of health in Monagua: a pink building posters of Che Gevera, Fidel Castro, and Jesus lining the walls. On the way in there was a metal bar low to the ground that tripped everyone who entered the building. It was a typical office environment with ringing telephones and typing typewriters. The only difference was that the secretaries were talking on cell phones and typing on typewriters. We went upstairs where there were more pictures of Che, Fidel, and good ol’ Jesus. It really was weird how many posters there were of them considering they were not exactly the three musketeers. We went inside the the office of the local health administrator. He had more pictures of the unlikely triad and also an industrial-sized air conditioner. We sat in a meeting with him for about two hours. The only thing I could figure out was that while the liberal party was in power, they built a large clinic in the middle of town. Then the conservative party gained power and decided that they should abandon the well placed and nicely sized clinic to build a smaller clinic outside of town. That’ll teach those liberals. So now the conservatives want to move back into the better clinic but they need three thousand dollars to renovate it. We just decided to placate them with two suitcases of drugs. They seemed to like that and let us go with their blessing. Chances are that those drugs are either on their way out of the country or into someone’s private collection.

We left the mini ministry of health, tripping on the bar on the ground, and climbed back into the van to go unpack the ultrasound machine. I mostly sat in the back of the clinic while the temperature slowly rose until it leveled out around 90 degrees. I watched as the doctors fumbled around with the crescent shaped ultrasound receiver. When they couldn’t get a good enough image my dad’s only advice was “add more gel and push harder.” You know what’s coming. After about thirty minutes of the various physicians poking and prodding the practice gel, they decided it was my turn. Hooray. I climbed up on the table and lifted my shirt. My dad showed them what to look for: the kidney, gull bladder, and portal veins. It tickled a little. Then it was time for the other doctors to try. As per his training the first doctor seized the transponder, pushed it into my ribs, and started wiggling it around. “Now take a deep breath” my dad said. “Ya right” I said. He said something along the lines of stop flexing. Little did he realize that my flexing was the only thing preventing him skewering me with a piece of hard plastic. Eventually he realized that the extra two centimeters gained by leaning on the transponder did not actually affect the image all that much. I had similar experiences with the other five doctors. Eventually they finished me and all took part in wiping my gooey chest with paper napkins. I climbed up off the table just as a pregnant lady took my place. “Poor lady” I thought “she has no idea.”