Personal Narrative: My Medical Trip To Nicaragua

Never have I woken up faster than getting a phone call at 1am saying, “I need you STAT to H4104!” Racing from the call room to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, I had a million thoughts running through my head. Why is the RN calling me STAT? Is the patient coding? Is the intra-aortic balloon pump I am responsible for not functioning? When I arrive, the patient’s pressures were spiraling downward and the surgeon said he must go back down for surgery. Adrenaline pumping through my veins, I realized this was not an emergency simulation I had been taught – this was real. As soon as we reach the OR, the patient went asystole. Immediately, anesthesia started injecting medications, the OR staff lined up to do compressions and I managed the balloon pump; we
Coming from a rural community, it had sheltered me from some of major medical emergencies but also allowed me to observe the hardships that some people face when receiving healthcare is not easily accessible. My medical trip to Nicaragua exemplified this issue even more. There we set-up free local clinics in impoverished areas for people to come and receive a diagnosis for their unknown ailment or simply for a routine checkup that otherwise would not have been accessible to them. Every patient we saw spoke Spanish with only a limited amount being able to speak any English. Suddenly I realized the importance of a physician’s ability to understand a foreign culture and to find a way to communicate with patients who speak a different language. It was here in the rural communities of Nicaragua, thousands of miles away from where I live, that I was a part of practicing medicine the way I had always expected it to be. Seeing the doctors immerse themselves in the native culture and treat patients as fellow humans rather than the diseases they possess, I saw how basic and limited medicine can make such a large difference in one’s