Hospital dramas

I finally made it further into the Hospital de Clinicas today, and what an experience it was. I spent the morning wandering around with a very nice volunteer-retiree (here they call it ¨jubilada¨). Our first task was to find clothes for an elderly patient whom a retirement home had unceremoniously dumped on the hopital´s doorstep. Stark naked. Hospital gowns are either not used or not available, so we visited a room full of old clothes to see what we could find for her. We dug up a couple of nightshirts and some socks and then moved on after dropping them off. The woman was very disoriented and difficult to understand; she seemed to have as little clue about what she was doing there as the nurses and doctors did.

Next we visited a few rooms in the maternity section, stopping in to chat with some expecting mothers. The maternity and peds intensive care sections were the only ones that didn´t have peeling paint, rusted and dripping pipes, and gaping holes in the wall and whose floors weren´t covered in linoleum that had worn to the cement floor underneath. It seemed clean and efficient, though most of the rooms did not have lights.

In the peds intensive care unit, we visited a woman and her two children who were both sick with pneumonia. The woman seemed to provoke my companion intensely, and she went into the hall and talked animatedly with a nurse for several minutes. As we left, she explained that both the woman and her husband were ¨tontos¨, which in context I think meant mentally ill or retarded. She expressed frustration that nothing could be done to help them, and that the children would only be taken from the parents if the government´s assistance were solicited. She expressed frustration that they continued to have children that they could not care for.

My silent thoughts were something like ¨Not in a Catholic country--no contraception for you!¨ When she expressed her frustration to another volunteer, my thoughts were borne out--the woman, surrounded by pictures of saints and with ¨Juan 3:16¨ draped as a banner over her bookshelf, tsked at my companion and explaint that it was ¨la naturaleza¨ that they should keep having children.

Indeed.