Students and babies, babies and students...

New day, new group of student arrive at the MamaBaby Haiti Clinic. This time there are 8 students from our alma mater, Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. It was great to welcome a new group of faces and to know that their lives will be forever changed after this experience…I wish this opportunity would have been available to me in school as I would have  been able to get my clinical feet wet a bit earlier. In medical school we do clinical rotations in the last 2 years so for the first two years we spend the majority of the time studying, going to classes, studying, going to classes and oh yeah, studying. It is so nice to be able to get some real patient contact and to learn to take an accurate blood pressure or to understand what it is like to be in the room with someone who is having symptoms of one of those conditions we learned about in class. Some of the new curriculum changes at our school have the students getting to do clinical work such as blood pressure and other vitals earlier which in my mind will lead to better patient care when they finally do get to be “clinical students”. It’s all about the patient’s right?

Though we have been having a little drought in regards to the midwifery component of the clinic we did have 2 false labors in the past few days. This morning I woke to the sound of Santo our head translator calling to the midwives that there was a woman in labor (one of the downfalls of living in the midwife’s room, haha). This sweet woman apparently walked 2.5 miles down the mountain (trust me when I saw the mountains here are not paved and no pregnant woman should be walking down them) because she heard we were here, she has never received prenatal care with us so I imagine she has not received it anywhere. This is a scary thought as there are so many unanswered questions when a woman shows up without a history of care though our midwives are amazing and I know they will be able to provide her with the best care possible as this situation is not unique to our center. She has come to the right place and I am again thankful we are here!