I told the kids this evening that I hope more than anything they maintain the heart for people that they demonstrated this week. Medical school was hard, and the idea of residency terrifies me, but being able to work with people around the world and show them love is the reason I can continue to push through. Well, that and Jesus. It's clear that he continues to give me strength to push through the physical and mental limitations that I have and do the work that I need to do in the moments that I need to. This week was tough with the daily migraines, diarrhea (that plagued a lot of the group actually), motion sickness with the crazy bus rides and feeling nauseated often, and overall just feeling like crap. But in the midst of that I felt like I had the strength I needed to work in a stuffy little humid clinic room for 7-8 hours a day, and I had the mental capacity to think clearly enough to provide good patient care. I'm immensely thankful to Dr. Pilch for having me on the trip, for teaching me, and for even keeping me in medical school with her support. When you read this, thank you so much.
As I work with different organizations around the world I've seen good and bad, things that I want to incorporate into my organization and things that I definitely want to steer clear from. I definitely never want to lose the heart. The very name of the organization, Make A Change International, provides a very clear instruction for what I want us to be able to through our work. On our website I write about how the song by Michael Jackson inspired the name, and like the song talks about, it all starts with looking at the man in the mirror and making a change there first. I hope that as I progress through my career I never lose sight of that, and that I'm always willing to change for the better in order to provide the best service I can to others. I know that the people surrounding me -- friends, family, board members, etc. -- will always hold me to that, so I feel a sense of comfort in that.
Second, I never want the success of the organization to supersede the care that we provide to patients. My goal is to provide long-term, sustainable health care that is of high quality to underserved communities all over the world, and have an actual impact in the communities we work in by us taking action and seeking change -- and that has to be the highest goal. If we ever start to be more concerned with the "success" of the organization in itself, I ask any of you to call me out on that.
Third, I never want organization and things running according to plan to be something that tops serving others. If the schedule, plan, wake-up or drive home time changes, if we have to stay later than desired to serve that one more patient, then I want to do that. Within reason clearly as we cannot obviously work 24/7, but I've seen where flexibility is lacking and how it can affect service.
Fourth, I want people to have fun. I want the volunteers to have fun, I want the patients to have fun, I want the locals serving us to have fun. Health care shouldn't be a drag, it shouldn't be overly difficult, it shouldn't be mentally draining on everyone (physically maybe). Everyone should do this because they enjoy it and the service work itself should be a lot of fun.
Fifth, I want people to respect each other. I want them to know their limitations, know when to ask for help, admit their mistakes, and call people out for making mistakes when they need to. But through that, they need to be respectful. There were a couple times on this trip where it was done right and it was done wrong. The nursing director came to me one of the days and there was a misunderstanding in something I had said to her that she wanted to clarify and give me some constructive feedback. I was grateful. What came across in the moment with a difficult patient was not at all what I meant, and it was a simple misunderstanding that could have made for a difficult week. I was glad that she pointed it out and we were able to clarify things, and discuss a better way to communicate through difficult patients. The rest of the week, our interactions were splendid. There were times with other staff and some of the other groups at the hotel where our interactions were not so great, terribly disrespectful, and people were not receptive to discussing it properly. Dissension in any group will tear it apart and make it an awful experience.
Those are just a few of the things I take away from this week and I know that it was all positive as far as how it will affect the further development of Make A Change moving forward.
A couple entertaining and interesting patients from today now. We had one boy with a pretty good cellulitis in his foot, so that was a good teaching point for the kids as they had never seen it. We had a little girl who had some an interesting yellow-brown discoloration in her eyes....not quite scleral icterus, but maybe. We sent her to the hospital to get checked out as we weren't 100% sure. I had one patient who presented with his right hand as a stump, so I asked him what happened. He replied, "someone cut it off." I asked, "someone? as in like a doctor? or just....someone?" He said, "someone. I don't know his name or who he was. I was walking to work 50 years ago and he came up behind me and chopped off my hand." The translator was laughing pretty hard when he translated this because the guy was so stoic during his story. We all kinda started laughing too. Not that his story was funny, but he was so nonchalant about the whole thing....we were like, um wow? He was like, meh. Wasn't causing him pain, so that was a plus. I had another patient ask me if I had a pill that would, "keep women away." Yeah, I don't think they have that yet. Another kid had some cafe-au-lait spots on his neck concerning for neurofibromatosis, so we sent him to the hospital as well. Actually had a kid with a fever today who had a pretty bad URI, so started on antibiotics for that. First and only person I saw with an actual fever. Otherwise, just a lot of normal pathology that I've written about.
Well that's it for this trip. Thanks so much for reading. Always feel free to post in the comments or send me an e-mail at aaron@makeachangeinternational.org with suggestions, input, questions, etc. Your support is what makes the ability for us to change the world possible, so I pray that it remains. Consider supporting us financially moving forward as well if you don't already, there are a lot of students and health care professionals who could really use it in order to be able to go on trips like this and impact lives. My hope is always to change at least one life.....in this case we impacted about 1200, so that's pretty awesome.
Here are a few more pictures from today:
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