It’s Tuesday – day 4 of our trip. During our walk to the foundation, I sense that it is going to be an extraordinary day. This week just keeps getting better with each day. I was right. We got to see some pretty amazing patients today. I will start with Carlos. Carlos was an outpatient. He is a farmer that came in today because he was having problems holding onto his machete. He has sensory loss in his hands due to Hanson’s disease (this is one of the key symptoms), as well as a deformity in his last two fingers. Carlos didn’t have his machete with him today, so we weren’t sure how we were going to adapt it for him. Thankfully, one of the other guys at the Damien House had his machete and it was very similar to Carlos’. We were going to make this work! We went to the supply room and got some Styrofoam tubing to build up the handle. He loved it. Next idea – Dycem. OT’s love Dycem. It is this amazing grippy material that you can put on anything, so we put it around the tubing so he could have a better grip on the handle. The best part about the Dycem? If it gets dirty, you can wash it and it will go back to being sticky again! Carlos was smiling from ear to ear. He got up in the treatment room and was showing us how he used his machete to cut down the crops and such on his farm. It was one of my favorite treatment sessions of the whole trip!
Today was also Jacinto’s birthday. After lunch we decided to surprise him with some treats as well as singing Happy Birthday to him in Spanish and English. Some of the other residents joined in, and you could tell it made his day.
That afternoon my group also got to see Angela. She was another outpatient: a 16-year-old girl who had a unilateral below the knee amputation. Her new prosthesis had just come in and she had not even seen it yet. We got to be the first ones to help her with it! She was so excited to walk again. She got up right away and wanted to walk with us on the parallel bars. We taught her how to walk with her new prosthesis and the crutches until she was stable enough to walk on her own. It was so moving to see how it made her feel to be able to walk again! After seeing her, we had another patient. Thirty-five minutes later she was still in the waiting room – she wanted to get her picture with us before she left the clinic. This treatment session was such a beautiful experience for me.
After another successful day of treatment and working at the Damien House, Sr. Annie showed us one of her favorite restaurants in Guayaquil. The food was amazing and we even got to go for ice cream afterwards. This ice cream shop might be my new favorite…
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