Day 8- CerviCusco Clinic

I don't know if I ever gave a background of why I made this trip to Peru. Georgia Health Sciences University [aka MCG] has a women's clinic in Larapa, which is a district of Cusco, Peru. Twice a year the nursing faculty set a up a trip for nursing students to volunteer at the clinic. Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of death of Peruvian women and it is essentially preventable. One of the big issues is that these women don't have the tools that are necessary to do cancer screenings. Dr. Ferris created CerviCusco to help further cancer prevention. The clinic is open 6 days a week and they do various procedures during that time. Dr. Ferris comes to Cusco every other month to work in the clinic to do colposcopys and othe procedures. The people of CerviCusco also go out to villages in Peru to do screenings as well. We give them a yellow piece of paper with the clinic's information on it so they can call to find out the results of the pap smear.

One of the rooms in the clinic. We were rolling cotton onto bamboo sticks for the colposcopys!

The inside of the waiting area. This was in the morning before it got real busy

My little friends!

There was a guy herding his cows across the street from the clinic

Dr Azziz teaching us!

oh.my.gosh. I am in love with this sweet little baby boy! I got to hold him while his mom got her exam and he was smiling and talking to me the whole time. So most of the time you see babies wrapped up in all of those blankets. Part of the reason is because they don't wear diapers. Needless to say that blanket smelled pretty bad, but holding that sweet little boy was so worth it!

Some of the women picniking in front of the clinic

Since I have been here I have been able to do 2 campaigns, plus a mini campaign with some of the government people. We also have another on Sunday before we leave. The campaigns are so much fun! It is neat to see the little villages and different cultures. The women are always so grateful to us.

Friday the clinic was insane. There were a few bus loads women that came up and it was a mad house! Friday was also the day that the dean of the dental school and Dr. Azziz, the president of GHSU... so it was a pretty hectic day. We had 2 rooms doing pap smears and 1 room doing the colposcopys. I started out the day at 10 am in the colposcopy room with Dr. Ferris. We saw a few interesting lesions and one lady with a high grade lesion. Around noon Tya and I traded out and ate some lunch and went back to help since it was getting really busy. We passed out our brochures and entertained some of the little kids that were running around. We ended up with an entourage because we gave them stickers and they pretty much loved us ever since. These 2 little girls followed me everywhere I went and of course all I can say in Spanish [that doesn't have to do with pap smears] is hello and how are you and beautiful. So our conversations were short lived, but they didn't care. I eventually figured out that they kept asking us for stickers. They were real cute.

I got to work with Dr. Azziz for the rest of the afternoon. He is a fantastic teacher and I learned a lot from him! There was one case that is pretty devastating. This 23 year old woman with a 4 year old son went to the hospital complaining of painful urination and back pain, thinking she had a UTI of some sort... 15 days in the hospital and they never thought to do a pap smear. I think she was one of the patients they screened on a campaign a few months ago, but i'm not 100% sure. She lived about 4 hours away and had to raise money for the bus ride. When Dr. Ferris did her exam she was full of cancer. Her cervix was completely eaten away with cancer and it moved into her bladder. Her skin was flaking off and she started to hemorrhage and they had to send her to the hospital because he said she probably wouldn't make it much longer. I couldn't imagine thinking you were fairly healthy and hearing you have stage 4 cervical cancer and that you probably won't make it another week. That girl is my age and she was all by herself because her mom was watching her son and she had no way to contact her family. Pure devastation.

We had a pretty steady crowd of patients up until about 615 pm. It was a really busy day, but amazing none the less. After we rested for a while we went salsa dancing again. I can see this being a normal thing for me [hopefully Adam loves it too :)].