Weekly Update

We really are still alive. It's been a run-around week, so we fell off the blog wagon for a few days. Tuesday we went back to the University to take my letter from the Regent's office to the diploma printing office. Supposedly, in one month I will have a diploma!

Here is a great picture of one of our patients who has been coming to see us for catheter placement due to his prostate problem. He is 94 years old and probably not strong enough to handle surgery, so we are prescribing medicine and using a catheter to keep his bladder emptying well. The only problem is it gets stopped up from time to time and has to go to the hospital in the middle of the night to get it irrigated or changed. So....we showed the family how to do in-and-out catheterization at home. They were so thankful and felt confident they could maintain clean technique. I took his picture with his son, and showed it to him. He obviously still has great eyesight, because he immediately started laughing and said it was a good picture.

It's been really cold here, although our trusty thermometer swears it's only 50. But jumping into 50 degree sheets at night is still a shock! Today in clinic the ladies from church kept up filled up with hot cereal drinks and a great chicken soup with tamalitos. We crowded around the kitchen fire to keep warm--good times! Kemmel went out with the team of agriculture professors from the University of Tennessee (the other UT). The did some follow-up investigation into their chicken program in Xepocol and also out to La Estancia to check out dry season crops and possibilities for raising cattle. In talking with the women in the chicken project, apparently some of the chickens had bitten the dust after coming in contact with some neighboring infected chickens. The ladies here are really reluctant to quarantine and "eliminate" the sick ones. So, they all had a good chat and went over some of the guidelines for maintaining healthy birds. They also found out that there has been a little price gouging and pressure sales of the wrong product going on at the vaccine store. So maybe we can help them sort that out. Three of the ladies were interested in going to another community to teach a class on raising chickens--"see one, do one, teach one".