Superseis

This past week one of the things that I did was to make a powerpoint presentation for Mita´i to use in a meeting with the supermarket chain "Superseis." When you shop at Superseis they ask you if you want to round up your purchase to the next 1000 guaranies, and then they (supposedly) give the difference to charity. So Mita´i wants in on the action, hence the meeting and the powerpoint. I don´t know if they actually want me at the meeting, but we´ll see. The presentation was the result of a very long meeting that I had with the president of Mita´i, Monica. She is a well-to-do Paraguayan-German mother of a cancer survivor. Most of the meeting was her asking me questions about Mormons, sharing her feelings on almost every other religion, her husband´s job, her special diet of biblical foods, her opinion on international loans, and me listening while eating lots of food that her cook had prepared. Everyone who has even a little money here in Asuncion has a maid or a cook or a maid/cook. Sometimes I love the idea, but sometimes it drives me crazy. Like when Monica takes care of talking my head off and her cook takes care of everything else.

Something cool this week - I got to scrub in and see a surgery. I got there as the surgery was finishing;I went back to the surgical wing, introduced myself, and they said that they had a surgery going on right then and why didn´t I go watch right away. So they gave me scrubs to put on, and then the cap, face mask, and booties. Then they told me to wash my hands and just put me in the door. No introduction to the surgeon or anasthesiologist or anything. So I introduced myself and they welcomed me in and I watched as the surgeon stiched his little patient up. Everyone here is really confused when I tell them that I haven´t gone to medical school yet, because here you go to medical school right after high school. So they always ask if I´m a doctor, then if I´m studying medicine, then they are confused as to why a 24 year old kid wasn´t already in if not done with medical school. When I asked them what was wrong with the patient, they gave the diagnosis, which of course I didn´t understand. So I asked them what that was and they pointed to the kid´s manly parts and said that they didn´t work. If I didn´t understand the formal diagnosis, how would I ever understand anything besides, " this part here that I am pointing to doesn´t work, stupid." (the stupid was inferred) The patient was probably eleven years old or something around there, and whatever they did required stitches all around the penis and some on his inner thigh. It kind of looked like to me that his penis was attached to his inner thigh and they had to seperate it and kind of reconstruct it.

The interesting part was when they finished and the anasthesiologist started to wake the kid up. He hurt a lot and started to move around, wanting to touch the stiches and his wound. The nurses were doing something else and the doctor couldn´t hold the kid down by himself, so I held the kid´s legs. It reminded me a whole lot of docking the lambs with grandpa. The interesting part was that the anasthesiologist didn´t put local anesthesia on the surgical wound until after he was awake and hurting. Maybe there was a reason for that and maybe not, but it seemed like kind of a dumb idea for the ten minutes that the kid was crying and we were all holding him down until the local anasthesia kicked in.

This week I would like to see a complete surgery, hopefully a tumor removal or something. But for now, I need to sleep, people.