Human Relief Organization

June 13, 2010

Junglemedic News letter

Some days are harder than others huh?

Well if you have looked at my web page you may have noticed there is a small calendar at the bottom right hand of the page. This lets people and future teams look at my schedule so they can plan their trips here easier.  If you take a look at this you will see that I am booked solid with teams for the next three months straight every week.

Now I know it can get a little tough but the people here are sick and really need the help from the flooding and the hurricane. So we will be seeing thousands of patients over the next 3 months.

But the reason I am writing this time is just for me. I need to share my day and my heart in hopes some of you will keep me in your prayers.

I got up early yesterday morning at 4:30 and got my shuttle bus all prepared with the normal oil and water and air in the tires etc and then took off for Honduras to pick up my medical team from Alabama.

The problem was I had not getting much sleep the night before because my wife Marleni had a wisdom tooth she wanted me to take out. I keep putting her off for months because it was impacted and had not yet erupted through the bone and I know it would be difficult and a lot of work. But she kept saying Bryan if you don’t do it know we won’t have time until Sept.

So I finally gave in and set up my dental chair and instruments and gave her a lower mandible block with lidocaine and then took a scalpel and laid a flap and went into try and elevate the tooth. But in the process I soon realized it was not yet through the bone and I could not get this tooth our with our sectioning it in half and I did not have the right equipment to do that. So I could not get the tooth out. So she kept insisting that I could do it because she has seen me pull hundreds of teeth and just assumed this was the same. But an impacted wisdom tooth in the bone is a job for real oral surgeon with the proper equipment. I am not only not an oral surgeon but I did not even stay in a Holiday Inn express. We don’t even have one here in Guatemala.

So now it is 7 at night and where are we going to find an oral surgeon at night in the boone docks where we live. Well fortunately one of the girls Marleni goes to Psychology  school with has a cousin who is a female dentist and so she called her and asked her if she could see Marleni and take out this too since I had already opened up the tissue all around the tooth area.

The Dr. was wonderful and said yes come to my office in Puerto Barrios with is only 1 ½ hours away. So at 10:30 pm Marleni is finally in the dental chair with the Dr working on her with the right equipment and a drill to cut the tooth in half and then bring it out in two pieces. Meanwhile I am worried sick, not about the dental procedure but that fact it is late and Mac Donald’s will be closing soon and this is the only town with a Mac Donald’s.

So I head off to Mac Donald’s and get a # 1 meal big Mac and then rush back to the dentist office just in time for Marleni to be finished. I am not really that heartless the Dentist just did not want me in the room while she was working, but did let me come in when the procedure was finished.

So we get home about 1:00 am and finally get to sleep. I get up at 4:0o am and head off to Honduras to pick up my team. I rush to cross the boarders and then rush meaning driving my shuttle but at 65 mph through the country side to get to the city where there is a Sam’s Club. I get all of the groceries on the list and while I am doing this I am worried about Marleni who is in terrible pain and her jaw swollen like she was hit with a baseball bat and she too is up early and having to drive back to Puerto Barrios 1 ½ hours to Physiology school for her final exams. She can hardly drive let alone think to take test. So I am worried and afraid of driving on these roads in Guatemala.

Anyway I get to Sam Club and rush to get my groceries we need for the next two teams.

I then drive back through the city of San Pedro Sula and get to the airport and wait on the team to depart the airplane. They make it through with no problems and then all 18 people load onto the bus and we head home.  They are asking me a million questions as usual and I am telling them all about Honduras and Guatemala and the history and everything they want to know about. Luckily if I don’t know the answer I can just make one up and heck they don’t know the difference….. (Just kidding) I would never joke around with a team.

So we get home and to be honest I am one tired Hombre ( which I think is Spanish for a cheese Omelet, but not sure exactly)

So I am getting them settled in their rooms and getting the suitcases of meds separated and checking on Marleni who feels like she has been beaten with a base ball bat and completely washed out with food and on strong pain meds and antibiotics.

The dinner bell rings and I say ahhh time to relax and ate I am starving. I set down and just as I get the Parmesan cheese on my spaghetti they bring in a woman from the jungle who has now been in labor for 20 hours and this is her 9^th baby. So as first I am thinking darn I am not going to have time to go eat my spaghetti because this baby is going to pop out like a toaster. So we get her gowned up and to an exam and find out with our Doppler that the babies heart is very weak and also from the position of the baby I believe it is transverse and that is why is it not moving down the birth canal. I decided to take her to the hospital before the baby dies and hope they will do a
C-Section.

To be honest I think the lady just waited too long to come to my clinic and I don’t think the baby was still alive when we got to the medical facility. So that was sad and I think  with being tired and already driving 8 hours to get the team I was drained.

So we get back to the dorm and I start to have a team meeting with the team and another emergency comes in with a man’s hand crushed but Marleni (while in pain herself) goes and sutures his hand back up so I can finish my meeting as it is getting late and I know the team is tired from traveling all day.

Soon she comes running up to the meeting on the 3^rd floor and say’s Bryan you have to go to Los Florida a village in the jungle for a woman bitten by a snake. I say Marleni can someone bring her here? It is raining and dark and I still a million things that need to get taken care of. She says not the Fire Dept ambulance is already at the hospital with another patient and they need you to go take care of her because she needs an IV and then the snake anti-venom and only you can do that.

So I just in the ambulance with my supplies and 4 team members who want to see what my days and nights are like doing emergencies in the jungle and off we go down the road. They are saying well this is not so bad the road is paved and even though you are driving 115 kph in the rain, we think we will live….

We then take a sharp right onto a stone road that then tasks us into the jungle on a mud road. I have now slowed way down to only 100 kph and we finally get to the village. I find a 48 year old women who had been bitten about an hour before. I ask the husband if it was a Fer De Lance snake sine that is the most common and that is the anti-venom I have.

To my horror he pulls out a jar and shows me the snake and it is a deadly coral snake. I try not to show it in my face but I know there is no anti-venom for coral snakes.

But the anti-venom I have is for neuron-toxin and hemo-toxin and I decided to go for it and try it anyway. So wouldn’t you know the lights in the back of the ambulance would not work? (Probably a wire shook loose on the rough road) So with flashlights I get an IV into the lady and then push the anti-venom into her vein praying this will work and save her life.

Thankfully the fire dept ambulance found another driver and they took her the rest of the way to the hospital in there second ambulance. So at 11:00 pm I say thank God they could drive her on to the hospital. We all jump back into the ambulance and I get home and park the ambulance and clean it out and then see Marleni is still up on her computer studying for her last final exams next Sat since she will be working all week with me and the team during the day doing medical clinics in the jungle.

I say baby let me check my e-mails and then let’s call it a day and get some sleep.

When I open my e-mails I find two of my sisters have written to tell me about my father. He had a massive heart attack a week ago and only has one lung.

Now to be honest my parents and I have not been on good terms for years, but after I married Marleni she made it a priority for me to make things right with my parents. They fell in love with her and her daughter Cielo and so my parents and I have made things right and thanks to Marleni I was able to call my father in the hospital last week and talk to him and tell him how much I loved him. He said I love you too son. My mother wrote to Marleni and said thank you for giving us our son back.

The two e-mails told me that my father had taken a turn for the worse and they we removing all life support that night as his vital organs were shutting down. They said if he makes it until tomorrow they could take him home in an ambulance and he could at least die at home.

To be honest I have not seen by father for many years now living so far away. But the team was now in their rooms and Marleni on the computer studying and I went out in the rain and climbed up in the bus and just to be alone. I don’t know if it was that I was tired and worn out or knowing the baby I took was probably going to die, or knowing in my heart the anti-venom I gave the lady was not made for Coral snakes and she could easily die within hours or not have even made it to the hospital, but then getting the news about that my father may die that night I guess it just finally hit me.

With no one around but God I just began to cry and cry and think Dad I love you and always have. You were a United States Marine and fought in the Korean War and was shell shocked and then worked two jobs to give me and my brother and sisters a nice home and clothes and food and you spanked me when I needed it (which in my case was pretty much every day)  But he did it to try and teach me to be a responsible young man and also to be a good father. So I have to get going with this team but I woke up early and came down to write this. I do not know at this time if my father is alive or has gone home.

But I do know that his life for the past many years has been to tell as many people about Jesus Christ as he could. So for all these things I am proud of my father and love him and I guess the hardest past for me was realizing I cannot fly back to the states for my own fathers funeral because so many people are depending on me to bring them help and medical treatment.

So say a little prayer for my Mom and family and  for me an Marleni too as we have a long road ahead of us for the next 3 months, so now you can see why I say:

“some days are tougher than others huh” thanks for listening.

Bryan

Bryan Buchanan

JungleMedic Missions  

Rio Dulce, Guatemala

Web Site: www.Junglemedicmissions.org

————

Junglemedic News Letter

 

Clayton State University Medical Team

 

 

 

Hello everyone from Guatemala

 

We just had a team of 20 nurses and nursing students come from Clayton States University in Atlanta GA for 10 days. Although it was a great group, it seems like if something could go wrong or break it would. We were on such bad roads and had to cross rivers and so remote that my vehicles took a major beating. On the way back from long day in the jungle doing a clinic we got half way home and the fan broke on the bus and blew apart causing the engine to overheat.

So everyone had to pack into the pick up truck and trailer and ride home.

 

However in 6 days of doing clinics in the extremely hot weather these students nurses where awesome. They worked hard each day and we ended up treating 1,997 patients.

 

People walked as far away as four hours to seek medical attention, in this heat with babies on their backs.

As you can see most of these people have never seen a Doctor and so they

Were willing to stand for hours to receive some love and attention and medical care.

 

Sometimes it was just not that the road was bad but we also have traffic jams.

As you guys know when you drive to work in the morning once you get behind a herd of slow moving cows it is hard to pass.

 

 

We saw everyone from 1 year old to 99. As you can see this baby is looking at a white guy with a beard (which most Guatemalans do not have) and thinking this guy is one ugly Hombre….

 

 

After getting home from seeing hundreds of patients there were usually other patients waiting on us. This little girl was sop weak and Jaundice that even the local government socialized medicine system could not do anything for her so they sent her home to die. So they came to us and fortunately the team had brought a lot of special infant formula with the vitamins and nutrients she needed and we are not establishing a contact with the John Hopkins Hospital Neo-Natal Unit to help us with our TelMed online video system.

 

Of course when there was an emergency and someone needed sutures the student nurses would fight over who got to do sutures and then I would have to suture up the student nurses who had fought and cut each other open with switch blades and broken beer bottles…. This was a group from Atlanta so to this is was just clean fun……OK so I am joking again to much but they did all want to jump in and help on emergencies.

 

This man has been living with this ands the pain for a year now because he did not have enough money to take a bus to the hospital 4 hours away. In the States we cry if we have a headache and don’t get immediate relief from a pain med yet these people somehow just live with the pain. I don’t know how they do it.

 

Driving in Guatemala is a bit different than the States. This is actually a lady in front driving the motor cycle with a lady behind her holding her child standing up. Can you imagine this in the USA? The team was horrified, not at the kid standing but that I stopped driving and took pictures. But I think it was when they saw me sleeping at the wheel they got nervous.

 

 

The kids are beautiful huh?

 

They love Marleni…..

 

 

One village we could only get to by water as there is no road access. So one of the girls told me she is a city girl and had always dreamed of driving a boat so after a few instructions I let her drive the boat across the lake and she was in heaven.

 

 

But I have to tell the heat and amount of patients and stress gets to even the best of us huh? By the last day I was wiped out. I know it is not that I am getting old or anything like that it is just dehydration.

 

But honestly it was the team that kept a good attitude and worked till the job got done.

Thank you to Dr Karen Weaton who put this program together and made it happen.

Also thanks to each and every one of you who came and gave your time and skills and love to the people of Guatemala.

 

 

 

Thank You all from Clayton State University Georgia

 

Clayton State University Nursing Student Team

 

 

 

Bryan & Marleni Buchanan

 

Junglemedic Missions

Rio Dulce

Guatemala

 

 

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