Semana Santa here in Roatan!

So this is ‘Semana Santa’ or holy week.. which in Canada is a more somber respectful holiday and we generally only celebrate only Good Friday and Easter Sunday.. but here it is more of a week-long celebration/vacation which is mostly a week long drunk-fest. Many Hondurans spend the week vacationing and a lot decide to come to Roatan where they can spend the week on the beach, so the island is PACKED with people! The clinic closed at noon on Wed and we are off Thurs & Friday. It has been so nice to have a few days off and I’ll admit I’m just catching up on sleep and finally taking a few mins to update this blog!

It has been a whirlwind these last few days.. actually the entire time I’ve been here thus far has been a whirlwind. I thought that I’d have a bit more free time this year, compared to last year because I’m not a student and don’t have schoolwork to do.. but I seem to be just as busy or worse than last year! Lol.

So this past two weeks has been transition time, lots of volunteers coming and going. Danielle, my roommate from last year has come for 2 weeks, and she is living with us. It is so GREAT to have her around again!! I really enjoyed living with her last year and it has been so nice to reconnect again. Then Lacy, another volunteer I had gotten to know fairly well last year came in this past week (just for a week) as well. So its been a really great reunion of sorts and we are having such a blast! It has kind of softened the sadness of everyone leaving last week to have them coming in instead. We have had a really great time catching up and doing all our favourite things from last year and man, we have crammed a lot in! :)

Our last two weeks at clinic have been good. Still lots of changes going on at the clinic; among the management and how things run (so continue to pray about that). Plus it’s hard when there are people in for such a short time too. It takes a few days to train them and then they are only there a few days before they go again. Also we are learning to work with less volunteers around the clinic. I think we got a bit slack having so many people around, but our numbers have thinned out and after the next week or so it will be constant for prob 6 weeks or so til we have another transition time..  We’ve seen some interesting things over the last bit and had some very challenging days! (my time on unit 1 has certainly prepared me well.. in more ways than I can even be thankful for!) And I’m certainly growing a lot as a person and as a nurse!

We seem to have had a lot of excitement at the clinic recently.. there was a gringo (American) bit by a coral snake last Sunday who had to be medivac’d out to Houston because there is no anti-venom here or on the mainland. The clinic had its first birth since Kate & I have been here and unfortunately we missed it! : ( They had tried to call us in the middle of the night but there was no cell phone service and we missed it. Apparently they picked up the labouring mom on the side of the road as she attempted to walk to the clinic and they delivered her baby less than a half hour after arriving at the clinic! Then we had a crazy day at clinic with the new mom & baby upstairs, a peds inpatient for most of the day and growing chaos downstairs. I felt like I spent the day ‘putting out fires’ so to speak; it was just one crazy thing after another! I finally finished triage and things seemed to be going smoothly, and then we had a crazy emergency! A young man was swimming and he stepped on a poisionous fish.. he was in such excrutiating pain that I couldn’t even get a set of vitals when he arrived (he busted off a BP cuff and I couldn’t hold his wrist because he was vibrating in pain and kept grabbing ahold of me and screaming in agony). We finally after we googleed it, we were able to identify the fish, which was both good & bad – good to finally know which fish but bad because now we realized that its poison could potentially kill him (very toxic!) So it was a race against the clock to see what we could do for him and try to save him. The med students all jumped in to brainstorm how to save him and I popped in an IV and we gave him some narcotics IV push to calm him down some (also hoping to slow the spread of the toxins thru his bloodstream) Then after a few mins of researching we learned that no one had any kind of anti-venom for this type of fish nearby (here or on the mainland) & he couldn’t afford a medivac. Then a med student discovered an article that said submerging the puncture site in hot water can help draw the venom back out, if it is done within a 90 min window. So I tried to keep him calm and the others began boiling water in the microwave and running it thru the coffee pot without any grounds. We had a great system going to keep the water his foot was in hot and we kept him comfortable with narcotics and long story short, he survived! : )  So the miserable chaotic day had a silver lining because a baby was born and we saved a young man’s life. 

Oh, the other fun thing that happened this past week is that Katelyn’s sister and best friend came to visit! Kara & Neil came in on Sunday as a big surprise for Katelyn!! I was in on it, so I knew they were coming but we managed to keep the whole thing under wraps and she was beyond excited!! It was sweet! And now they are here visiting for 10 days! It has been tons of fun to have them here with us! We have been showing them around our island home and it has been such a blast! It was like the cruise ship day, times 10 days!! We get a little taste of home and we get to share our home with them.. its great! Just what we needed! And it’s perfect that we have the Easter holiday to spend with them!! We have been enjoying lots of fun adventures: swimming at the dolphin pen, going out for supper, having ice cream on the dock under the stars, visiting the market, having a movie night and just enjoying each others company!