Red-Letter Day (11/29/00)

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It has been a red-letter day, or more correctly, a red-letter couple of weeks! 

At Hospital Loma de Luz, we took our first patient X-ray today!  We received a C Arm X-ray unit from Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie, Indiana (Thanks, Dr. Clark and Mitch Carson!).  This is a portable X-ray unit used generally to aid surgeons during operations.  As often is the case here, we will use it for much more than its intended purpose!  It displays images on a television screen, and saves up to 25 pictures in its memory.  Unfortunately, we don’t yet have capability to develop X-rays, but we were able to hook up a small thermal copier from an ultrasound unit, and make wallet-sized pictures to store in the patient chart!

 

Also today, Cornerstone acquired a large nice rental home in La Ceiba to be our staging facility for work teams, our communication center, and our missionary “hang out” in La Ceiba when we are trapped by the weather or waiting for late airplanes.  Work teams will no longer need to stay in hotels the night before their departure.  We will be busy preparing and furnishing the house before our next work team season.

 

A couple weeks ago, we hosted an eye surgery team that broke in our new operating room.  Yesterday, we did our first general surgery case, removing a small “lump”, a lipoma, from the head of a visitor from The States.  This allowed us the opportunity to “try out” our arrangement in the room, and use our new electrocautery unit (Thanks, Dr. Steve Myers!)  We have a couple of minor procedures scheduled for next week, plan a couple of “trial runs” without patients for hernia repairs, and then hope to begin a regular surgical schedule.  Since we don’t have any trained OR personnel, we will all be learning this together as we go!

 

Finally, this has also been a sad time as we have said goodbye to several visitors who have shared in our lives over the past weeks and months, and to Harold Reyes, our anesthetist, and his wife, who have moved to La Ceiba to work with other missionaries.

 

There are many more things that make these last few weeks special, like a surprise birthday party for our nurse Chrysti, Drs. Shaw and Sharon Yount working in the clinic, 19 at our place for Thanksgiving, and more septic system problems in our house.  But that will suffice for now!

 

We trust you had a great Thanksgiving celebration.  We all have much to give thanks for!

 

Dave Drozek with

 

Thoughts from Honduras

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