Medical Mission: Lima, Peru
Leave a commentOctober 11, 2011 by love.antoinette
I tried to blog earlier about being out here in Lima for a medical mission. Unfortunately the lack of sleep, exhaustion, and slight sickness has caused me to to have a closer relationship with my hotel bed more than the keyboard at the moment. When I spelled “grateful” wrong and couldn’t figure out how or why, I knew something wasn’t right with my brain. Needless to say, I got some rest and late breakfast and I’d like to see if I can actually resume the process.
We landed down here in Lima early Saturday morning with some of the other volunteers from the organization. We were immediately taken to our uber luxurious hotel in San Isidro, which is the business district of Lima as well as a mid-upper class residential neighborhood with cute boutiques and restaurants. For those of you who don’t know, I work as a Registered Nurse in NYC in a pediatric cardiac ICU. Our institution does a great number of cardiac surgeries on babies and children with congenital heart defects, heart transplants, ventricular-assistive devices, and major post-operation care for these often complicated surgeries. How I came about joining the cardiac surgical mission team was through one of my coworkers who is one of the coordinators for the organization. I felt like one of the luckiest people in the world when she asked me if I was available to go; a nurse who was previously assigned canceled and she needed a replacement. Like I said before and I’ll say it again, Betsy did not have to ask me twice: I’m in there like swimwear! This was the main reason why I had to cut my Turkey vacation shorter and opted Greece out of the picture [for now]; I wanted to have more days available for this mission alone.
Fast forward four days and life out here in Lima has been a whirlwind of the volunteer work, pisco sours (Peru’s well known alcohol drink), site seeing, gastronomic pleasures (beyond delicious foods), birthday cakes, and an almost failed attempt at reversing sleeping cycle. I usually work day shift from 7am to 7:30pm at work back home but over here, they needed some night shift nurses and despite the schedule, I was still more than happy to take it. A little sacrifice is worth a long shot in the end. Part of me still feels like I’m not in Peru but part of me does; mind you, I was just in Turkey three weeks prior to this mission trip. It’s been kind of like a blur to me. When the clouds wash away from my brain [hopefully sooner than later], I will be talking more about how beautiful this country is and how the mission trip is so far. I just wanted to do a fill-in blog since I’ve been away from WordPress.
love.antoinette
love.antoinette 