No seriously, where are the ducks?

Friday, Jan 12, 2013

There's a famous saying in the US of A called TGIF, and it doesn't refer to the food joint -- it refers to the fact that the end of the week is here and because its been an exhausting week, it demands to be celebrated. That is not to say that our first week in San Ignacio was exhausting, but I was just missing the cold weather, and therefore was happy that the week was over, meaning we were closer to the colder weather. Please note: this does not mean I wanted to go home any faster, because I was slowly but surely falling in love with the country and all the people.

Now, onto the clinic.

This time, we had our old driver back, meaning that we got there in a matter of 20 mins, even though we got a bit lost.

To compensate for the fact that we had a very small place at Duck Run 1, Duck Run 2 had TWO buildings which we could use. It was decided that one building was going to be the pharmacy, while the other building was going to be triage and assessment. We ended up in the pharmacy this time, and because of the location of the buildings, I was able to creep into the assessment room where my homies were. One guess as to who those five were.

Their first patient was a lady with hyperthyroidism, who was given medications which weren't helping. You could actually see a bit of Grave's Opthalmopathy on her. We handed her some APAP for her head pain and vitamins.

I am a very odd pharmacy student in the fact that I have never worked in a pharmacy (apart from my 3 week IPPE) and therefore it was pretty awesome to take part in handling medications. We handed out a lot of vitamins and APAP and IBU and some more vitamins. A woman wanted a pregnancy test so some people drove to the pharmacy and got her a preggers test. It was a pretty quiet day, considering Duck Run 2 had a total of 150 people, and so we had a mini-dance party in the hospital and learned of the best game in the world -- Flow Free.

Then the patients seemed to dissipate so we ate lunch and candids were taken. Here are a few from Herbie's camera -- he's totally a creeper.

After a long and arduous (cough cough) clinic day, we went to the Cahal Pech resort to hang out at the pool and celebrate Megan's birthday. The view was amazing, and it was cool to just hang out with everyone.

We really had an amazing group of people and so it was awesome just hanging out. Some people then ordered food, which took about 40 mins to get there.  I really think that for the french fries they went to grow the potatoes, and then for the chicken fingers they went to butcher and sacrifice a cow.

We hung out at the pool for a few hours until we all got hungry and tired and walked back to our respective houses. It was nice to finally not walk a very long time because the resort was very close to us.

That night, we again went to Cayo Twist, and this time I had a delicious Strawberry Vanilla waffle cone and oh em gee that was one of the most delicious things I have ever had in my mouth. Once we inhaled our ice creams (no one seemed to complain about brain freezes), we walked to the casino, where we were photographed and let loose. I played with four BZ dollars and won nothing, though there were some very exciting moments with coin droppings. Liz and Dani were on a roll; the best part wasn't even winning anything, but watching Liz borrow Dani's coin, and after winning three coins, giving back one to Dani.

When Liz and Dani ran out of coins, Liz ran to get Maureen and then played vicariously through her. It was the funniest thing I'd seen in a while.

For some reason we all felt extremely exhausted and retired to our humble abodes around 10pm. Apparently we missed one hell of a show at the Casino, which no one is willing to give details about.