La Cirugia

I don't think I want to have back surgery anytime soon in Ecuador. We watched one today, and it looked PAINFUL. We went into it, not knowing exactly what they were doing. It said on the sheet it was "removal of a strange object." Turns out it was a bullet, because the girl had gotten shot two days ago. The surgery itself looked sterile and all, it was just a lot of hammering and pounding on the back in the vertebral column. It was a couple of hours of hammering, taking to the nurse Anita, and an occasional Cat Stevens on the radio. I really liked Anita. She works 16 hours a day (2 jobs), 5 days a week. An 80 hour work week just to get by!...and I hear that's really common to have two jobs here. I felt super lazy after talking to her. She was cute though, she was saying how she liked the operating rooms because it was "mas tranquilo," and she can just rest.

Some other people in my group saw a craniotomy and some other very interesting surgeries that I won't mention. I crashed when I got back to the hotel and took a very long nap. We had class for an hour tonight, and then I ran on the treadmill in the hotel while watching Hitch in Spanish. Love that movie no matter what! Oh...and by the way...they don't really have privacy rules here...thus the pictures in the operating room. I took some of the actual surgery, but thought I'd spare those for you Dad. :)