Friday night with the Bomberos

Well it's been a few days without an update...

Friday was a very busy and exciting day. We spent all day working in the clinic. We got to do follow-up with most of the people and children we worked with on Tuesday last week. It was extremely rewarding to see that most of them were doing much better.

Then Friday night we did a 12 hour shift with the Bomberos Voluntarios. They are the main prehospital emergency service in Antigua. They're mainly responsible for 911 calls (which are 122 or 123 here) dealing with trauma, pregnancies, medical emergencies, and fires.

They were extremely kind to us. They spent a lot of time with me explaining their system. As you can tell by the name, it's a primarily volunteer service. However, there's a strict training program everyone must go through first, and while we were there the chiefs were teaching a lot. It is a very positive, very structured organization.

Over the course of the night we went out on about 6 calls. Saw one pretty nasty head trauma (who turned out to be a difficult intubation once he got to the hospital), COPD exacerbation, a few pregnancy related calls that I won't go into detail about, and a few others. They said it was actually pretty slow for a Friday night.

Now that we're part of "the team" we can do some other stuff with them. I went to one of their training sessions last night. It's great to see the contrast between their service and ours in the US.