Hey look! Guess who went on a medical mission to Arequipa over a year ago and still hasn't managed to blog about it! Yeah, that's this girl. Lazy blogger and proud? Or something?
So. The summer after the first year of medical school is A. BIG. DEAL. It's basically the last summer of your life...until you get to fourth year, where, if you do it right, your entire spring semester is basically one big vacation. But that's beside the point.
Many students will opt to do something like research after wrapping up first year, as that's considered something that will make you more competitive for residency applications and everything further down the line...whether or not that's actually true depends on who you're talking to. I am not a research-oriented person. I did three semesters' worth in two different labs in undergrad - part of which was in conjunction with both my honors program and with biology honors - so I know what I mean when I say I don't have a lot of interest in making research a big part of my life. Instead, I wanted to spend my summer doing something more clinically-oriented. I applied for and was accepted to a family medicine preceptorship program [which I mentioned in bits and pieces over the course of my posts last summer] and I also opted to travel to Arequipa, Peru, as part of a medical mission trip sponsored by a ministry that is closely tied to my school.
We spent a little over a week, I think, in Arequipa, holding clinics at three different locations over the course of five days. Our group was composed largely of medical students - mostly rising second and third years - in addition to a handful of pharmacy students, a handful of actual doctors/nurse practitioners, a couple of counselors, a few spouses, and some ministry staff. We worked with partners from MMI-Peru while actually on site; our clinics were staffed with administrative workers and translators to help keep everything running smoothly, and we were also partnered with native Peruvian dental and optometry staff to provide additional services to the patients being seen. The clinics themselves were organized into multiple stations largely manned by us students [vitals, exam rooms, child care, optometry, dental, counseling, pharmacy, etc.]; we rotated through a different station in the morning and in the afternoon. We also participated in an outreach program with some of the local schools and/or orphanages wherein some of the students would visit a group of children to provide fluoride treatments and do mission trip-y type things like talk about Jesus. Not to sound overly flippant, but the state of some of those mouths makes me incredibly grateful to have grown up in the US with regular access to a dentist. It was incredibly sad to see so many rotten teeth at such a young age.
clinic #1
Our first clinic site was actually an old, unused clinic-type building. We had 3 exam rooms set up inside one building, a courtyard area in the middle where children were held to play while their moms were otherwise occupied, and a couple of back rooms where the optometrist and dentist had set up shop. It was something of a drive from where we were staying, but the scenery was so gorgeous on the way out.
clinic #2
Our second clinic site was in what I think was an old hospital-type location? Something like that. The building was divided up into a couple of different floors, so all of the work stations were scattered all over the place. I didn't end up with much in the way of photos of the actual clinic, so instead most of what you see above is from one of my afternoons on outreach. We were the ones responsible for actually putting on gloves and brushing globs of fluoride onto people's teeth with some rather ineffective Q-tips...it was definitely an interesting experience.
clinic #3
Our third clinic site was a largely unused hospital that was shut down largely for cost reasons. Its layout was definitely the most conducive to our purposes, especially in terms of the amount of space we had access to, but unfortunately we only hosted clinic at this site on our last day [whereas at the two previous locations we were open for two days]. Once again, I didn't have the opportunity to snap much in the way of clinic photos as I spent a good chunk of the day doing outreach again, but I ended up with so many great photos of the kiddos in the morning that it's difficult to narrow things down into what I feel is appropriate for sharing on the blog.
This whole trip was really like a photographic dream. It's so much fun to look back through my many, many pictures and relive the experience. There's obviously going to be a part two to this post, hopefully coming later this week, in which I'm hoping to talk more about actual thoughts on our trip instead of just giving an overview of events. As things currently stand, I'm trying to crank this post out really quickly before going to bed tonight and getting up early to get to the hospital tomorrow...#thirdyearproblems