Another health fair

Three more weekends to go, and I’ll be on a plane flying home!!!! Six months is a long stretch to be here. What makes it even longer is spending 90% of my time in a small room which leaves me 6x6 feet of space left over to study in. Well, our air conditioning is officially broken. It was working intermittently for a while, but it completely stopped 2 days ago. Fortunately, my parents prepared me for this sort of thing, by turning the air conditioning off in the summer evenings so we would get used to sweating at night (it wasn’t that bad – my window faces east, so maybe that’s why mornings were such scorchers).
I helped out with a health fair this past Saturday, organized by the SGU branch of AMSA (American Medical Student Association). It was held at a local school about a 1.5 hrs drive to the north end of the island. This time around was better than the first health fair I did last semester. Instead of having students at each station set up, we took the patients around to each of the stations to do a general physical check-up – history, vitals, eye/ear, glucose, breast exams (if needed), and even sickle cell tests for the children (I haven’t learned phlebotomy yet). There were a few local doctors there to see patients with specific complaints. So all in all, it was a really great experience – something that I don’t think I’ll encounter in the US. It was sad to see how many people had cataracts – none of the locals ever wear sunglasses.
Anyways, today is a national holiday – its Whit Monday (not sure of its history). So, I’ll be catching up on some studying that was put off last week (I seem to have adapted a one week off, one week on study schedule this third semester), after I go to the beach of course…..