Health Care in Honduras

***WARNING*** – this post contains graphic images of a broken finger.  If you will be grossed out please turn away.

My adventure in the health care of Honduras was entirely accidental.

After a Peace Corps meeting my friend Vanessa was rushing to get her bags so we could travel back to our sites.  In what was probably the most awkward fall I’ve ever seen, she stubbed her toe on the ground, put her hands out a little to brace the fall and went face first into the ground.  Of course, I started to laugh at her.  Then I saw that she was actually hurt.  I ran over to where she was and she held her hand up to me.  It looked like this:

So I stopped laughing . . .

We asked inside the hotel if there was a cab that could take us to the hospital in the capital (we were about 30 minutes outside of Tegucigalpa).  Of course, there was not in that town.  We found a mototaxi (a motorcycle with a cab on the back that fits 2 comfortably, 3 if you are aggressive and 4 if someone basically sits on the driver’s lap) and took it towards the center of town.  Naturally, the driver stopped next to some people in the road to ask if they wanted to jump in too . . . I guess he couldn’t hear the pain Vanessa was in or see how she was awkwardly holding her whole arm in the air.  I did my best to move him along, but I think I was too in shock to form words at that moment.

Once we got to the center of town, we waited for a bus to take us into Tegucigalpa.  While waiting we ran into 5 other members of our group waiting for the bus – so Vanessa’s story was played out publicly.  Since the bus was crowded, Vanessa had to sit by herself.  By this point, even though she was still in pain, I knew she was going to be ok.  So I sat in the back of the bus with some other Volunteers and started into the jokes about how we were going to have to get her a foam finger to put over the cast etc etc.

After taking a quick taxi from the bus to the Peace Corps office, getting the forms we needed and directions to the doctor (they assign us to different doctors depending on the problem – and they are not all in the same part of Tegucigalpa) we jumped in another taxi to the doctor.

The doctor was actually pretty good – an older guy who looked like he had seen it all before.  First he sent us to get some x-rays.  When we walked into the room the x-ray technician looked at Vanessa and asked her which hand it was.  Not a good start.  Then there was no putting on of those heavy lead vests or clearing the room of other people.  They just started doing it.  The doctor was actually holding Vanessa’s hand to get the right angle – I was pretty sure he was going to get in the shots too.

After confirming it was broken AND dislocated, they brought her into another room.  Before putting the cast on they had to ‘reset’ the finger.  They took Vanessa into an open room where patients were separated by curtains surrounding the beds.  I sat outside the curtains to wait . . .

The guy in the bed next to Vanessa was moaning in pain.  From the little I could understand, he was having trouble urinating and pain in his little man.  His doctor was inside the curtain, talking his patient through the pain . . . until his cell phone rang.  Then he stepped outside the curtain to take the call.

Meanwhile, they closed the curtain behind Vanessa and told her to lie down on the bed – I assumed they were going to pop her finger back into place and that I would hear her scream.  But after a few minutes I saw her outline through the curtain – and she was trying to button up her jeans.  Not exactly what I expected . . . it turns out they were giving her a pain shot in the butt.

That’s pretty much it for the entertaining part – after that they got the cast on and we went home.  Since Vanessa’s bus terminal and my bus terminal are close we split a cab – as it turns out the Honduran Rain Man was with us too.  He asked us where we were from – when I said New York he started telling me the state slogan, tree, flower etc.

This was all in early November.  I saw Vanessa about a week ago – her finger is doing great now.