Rhett’s Blog

In Belize

I have been in Belize for about 2 days now and things are going well. The hospital here is small, but they provide good health care for the people around here. I’ve been working with Dr. Lazo so far this week, who is the OB/Gyn. We’ve mainly just seen patients in the clinic with typical Gyn problems and of course a number of OB visits. No deliveries yet that I’m aware of.

They share ER call between the 3 full-time physicians here. There was a couple interesting cases that came through the ER today. The first one was a young man who had classic symptoms of ruptured appendix. He had been having symptoms for two weeks, but had been treated with only antibiotics up to this point. We got him back for surgery as soon as possible and the surgery went fairly well. The appendix was ruptured and the surgeon pulled out a huge seed of some sort that was blocking things. The surgery went great and right now he’s doing very well. The other case was a MVA. This guy in the local Mennonite community here got hit by a car while riding his motorcycle. He was really lucky. He had no neurological damage or head trauma. In the end, he had only suffered a colles fracture of the right arm. One final interesting thing is the number of dengue fever cases going around. I never thought I would see dengue fever in my career, but I’ve already seen about 4 cases here. Most cases are fairly mild with no hemorrhagic component; however, one little girl from this morning had a platelet count of 22,000. We sent her to Belize City for care.

Belize is such a beautiful country. It is obviously a very small country, but has a pretty diverse geography. On the east end are beautiful beaches and blue waters with the 2^nd largest barrier reef in the world. On the west side the elevation is higher with mountains (mountains in their standards, but more like hills according to someone from Utah) and tropical pine trees. Add on top of that a vast array of Mayan ruins and you have a pretty amazing place. I’m excited that I’ll be able to find some time on the weekends to see a few things and try to get a complete experience while here in Belize. Until next time, this is Rhett signing off.