Merry Christmas!!

I haven’t written here in forever. This year was one of the hardest years of my life, and I had too much going on trying to keep my head above water, to think about writing. 

But now that the year is almost over, I figured I should write something. Because I survived. Not only that, I’m actually OK. 

This year started with me buying a house-in-ruins, that I planned to finish demolishing and rebuilding it as my house. While I rebuilt it, I moved in with a friend who kindly offered to host me (for free!) while I made my house habitable. 

In med school, I started rotating through OB/GYN. If you remember my traumatic experience in Chad from last year, you can imagine this was not easy. It brought back memories. There were times I had to distract myself, or literally leave the room, in order to not start crying. 

Med school is a full time job. Building a house, is also a full time job. And I was also working as an English teacher, a few hours a week. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. 

Then I moved, while the house was still a construction zone. And started rotating through pediatrics, at a hospital 1.5hrs away. Then I ran out of money for the house. So now I was getting no sleep (because I had to get up at 5am) and I was very stressed and regretted buying the house. 

Pediatrics was, in a way, worse than ob/gyn. I had PTSD from my time in Chad about ob/gyn. But I want to have children, and seeing and interacting with these precious kiddos day in and day out, and seeing many of them being mistreated or simply needing so much more (anything, love, food, education, care) than they were getting, just about broke me. I kept thinking I could do better. And maybe I couldn’t. But my brain and my uterus kept yelling at me that I could do better and give me those kids and let me take care of them, damn it! 

I was about to break. And then, my 7-month pregnant cousin died of an aneurysm, the baby survived but had to be in the NICU for a few weeks, the family lived far away, and it fell to me, to go see her (the baby) and give her all the love and affection I could, until she could go home. Far away. Far away from me. 

So I did. I took care of this tiny little human, and loved her, and gave her my heart, and then... her dad came and took her (rightfully) away. And I broke. 

I was still rotating through peds. It was almost exams time and I could barely force myself to get out of bed and keep moving. 

But somehow I did. 

I kept going, managed to get honors in peds (I have no idea how!!) and get the house almost finished (with a LOT of financial help from my wonderful mom, who paid for my kitchen, among other things). 

And now, it’s Christmas. I am currently sitting at an airport bar, waiting for a flight to Mexico, a place I’ve already been, so I can turn off my brain and do nothing, but lie on the sand, bake in the sun, drink margaritas and eat tacos. 

Moral of the (very long) story: we are stronger than we think. If you’re going through a rough patch, know it, in your heart and soul, that it will be ok. YOU will be ok. I promise. 

Merry Christmas. 

Neonatal resus, or how not to kill a baby

I haven't written here in quite a while. The 3rd year of med school was really hard, and after my last time in Chad, I was not in a good place emotionally, which made it all even more difficult. At the end of the year, we have an exam that is the equivalent of Step 1 in the US, which allows us to pass on to clinical rotations during 4th year. Here med school is 6 years, 3 basic sciences and 3 of rotations.

It was hard, but I passed, bought a house (no joke!) and went on vacation for 5 weeks through Central America (Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica and Panama) which did wonders for my mental health. I came back rested and feeling better than I had in a while. Ready to start rotations.

However, as luck would have it, my 1st rotation was OB/GYN. And I started to have flashbacks from Chad. From hemorrhaging mothers and ruptured uteruses, and dead babies. More than once, I had to force myself to think of something else, look out the window and distract myself, so as to not start crying. Nobody here, the residents, attendings, fellow students, know that I've been to Chad and have seen more tragic outcomes in 6 weeks than they will see in their entire careers. As an inexperienced med student with no way to process any of it, and in a setting so poor in resources, than even if I had known what to do, I wouldn't have had the materials necessary to do it.

But let's skip over my 4 months in OB/GYN and jump forward to today. I have now started a 3-week rotation in Neonatology, before moving onto Pediatrics. And today we had a class and sim-lab for neonatal resus. I held it together by forcing myself to concentrate and actually learn everything I could, practicing manual ventilation and intubation, and learning all PEEP and PIP parameters.

At the end of the class, I walked out quickly, trying to hold back the tears. I couldn't stop thinking of one baby in particular, in Chad, who was born alive but died while I auscultated his diminishing heartbeats. That moment will be etched in my memory forever. The feeling. The shock. The numbness that followed. The only ambu bag we had was pediatric, which the nurse was trying to use but I don't think our efforts at ventilating were at all successful. The OB/GYN was busy trying to save the mother's life. I had no idea what to do, and there was no one else. I *know* that there was nothing else I could have done. But right now, I feel like I killed that baby. I feel like I should've been better prepared. And I'm fairly certain that, had that baby been born in a hospital with a NICU, or at least a neonatologist and better equipment, that baby would not have died.

THE UNFAIRNESS OF THIS WORLD MAKES ME INCREDIBLY ANGRY AND SAD.
(Sorry for yelling, but I can't help it.)

The world in 2018 is a disaster, and instead of improving, everything is going to hell. Instead of having a better division of resources, we're polarizing more and more. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are struggling to stay alive. The feeling of impotence and the anger at the world, at the leaders, at the greed of the richest and the apathy of...pretty much everyone (myself included) is getting to me. We need to do better. *I* need to do better.