Cesarean Section, School girls, and Cancer Patients

“Of all the joys that lighten suffering earth, what joy is welcomed like a new-born child?”

Today has been eventful! I saw my first c-section, went a visited an all girls school, and visited with the cancer inpatients. I also finalized my project and am very happy with everything!

So when we got to the hospital today we finalized our project with our doctor, Uma. He is very pleased with it and is planning on using it in the gynecology clinic, and more so in rural clinics and at women's health camps. He also is starting a women's health project soon---all of the work is done he just needs to implement the project. I say women's health because that is what anything dealing with women is called here. If it was called something else (like cervical cancer screening camp) no one would come because they wouldn't want anyone to think they had something wrong with them. Obviously getting screened doesn't mean you think or do have cancer but many women where camps are held (rural areas) are very uneducated about cancer except for the blurp they hear about in indian soap operas. Uma said that our flip book is exactly what he was thinking and wanting. I am really excited that he will continue to reproduce and use it after we leave! He is also going to be using our information from our evaluation in his women's health project (actually a family planning project), which is very pleasing to know what we are doing can help women in a number of ways. Our translator of our flip book and breast cancer cards (different than Usha, our vocal translator) finished the translation of our flip book from english to tamil today. Hopefully it can be printed and be ready for presentation to the mahasemam women on Monday! Everything else is ready to go---including chocolate and gifts for the women. Yeeha!

For lunch today we had drumstick soup. I asked one of the vocal translators, Angana (I had a really hard time not called her Angela!!) tried to explain to me what it was. I obviously didn't understand, so the man that in charge of food for us at the hospital (literally, he serves and waits on us ALL day long. Tea/coffee/cookies at 10, lunch at 1, tea/cookies/coffee at 4 EVERY DAY. The jobs people have here are really surprising. People are hired to press the next button on slides during a presentation or to sweep the sides of roads. Pondi, in the picture, serves us food when we are at the hospital---and thats all he does all day long!) Anyways, here he is showing me what a drumstick is. The soup was bright green and is apparently an aphrodisiac. After our doctor told us that I was like "Then....why are you serving us this?!" He said that it is used for people who have fertility problems.

After we showed Uma our final project (We do a final more serious presentation on Thursday to more hospital staff then just Uma) he asked us if we needed anything else. I was like...so how 'bout them babies Uma?..... After our tea/cookies we marched down to the gyneacology (that's the right spelling here!) and we got dressed in scrubs, hair nets, and masks and went right in to 'operation theatre' which here is surgery. Once we got dressed we had to take off our shoes, switch into two different pairs of flip flops and then we went into the 'labour' room. The scrubs we put on were all stained and we put them on in the nurse's bathroom, where the floor was soaked. In almost all the bathrooms the floors are soaked because people don't wipe, but spray themselves off. It also causes a very icky musty smell. I went to a really nice rooftop restaurant today (most nicer restaurants are on the top of hotels where the bugs are not as bad and the breeze is better! You can also see all of the 5 Meenakshi temple entrances from that high. Each tall building is an entrance and the whole space inside is a temple. Check it out: http://india.arzoo.com/ImageReader?mm=image/pjpeg&path=/17/741/741%201.jpg. I have pictures of it at night too. Back to the cesarean section. The bathroom floor was soaked and My scrubs had a few wet spots on them once I finally got them on. I walked into the labour room and the woman was already under anesthesia and was undressed. There were probably 5 people in there and the gynecologist. One woman was sanitizing the woman's midsection. We stood at her head for the initial cut and moved to her feet to get a better look after that. After the initial cut about 4 inches below the belly button and it took a few more cuts to get to through the abdominal fat. Thats about the only time a lot of bleeding happened. Once they got that deep they pulled the skin/fat towards the head to clear more area. They made a few more cuts to get through some (what looked to me, like fascia, a fiber like tissue) and then they pushed the bladder down out of the way. Next she cut open the sac and the amniotic fluid went everywhere. She was using scissors as clamps to clamp different tissues and other things to keep them from bleeding/moving too. She pulled the baby's head out and suctioned some fluid out of the abdomen and suctioned the baby's nose and throat. She cut the umbilical cord and clamped that too. A lot of suctioning was going on to remove the blood in the beginning too. After suctioning the baby she pulled it the rest of the way out and a nurse took it to another room along with some blood in a test tube (to test for genetic issues? I think it was the baby's blood) The baby looked very gray when it came out. We watched part of the sewing back up, but went to see the rest of the shots/preparation of the baby. When we got in the shots were already done, I have it written down what ones they do here somewhere... And they put really small tubes down the little girl's throat and nose and did more suctioning. She looked precious and healthy. Here is a picture after everything was done. It was so exciting and awesome to watch. It was so quick and fast. It made me VERY excited for my future.

After the c section we went to the palliative care area, where there were cancer patients getting treatment. They do free meals for cancer patients at Meenakshi, and we went to see the meals being handed out. It was very strange and people took a few pictures of us and we really didn't do any good. I felt awful and I couldn't leave without talking to some of the patients. There was one older woman who was getting treatment who also had a skin disease, my professor thinks it was the same skin disease michael jackson had, vitiligo. She had some very white skin and some spots of brown skin. I sat down on a stool next to her bed after everywhere had left except me and one of the translators, Siva, pronounces Shiva. I asked her if I could sit and talk to her and she was delighted to. We talked about her life, my life, her recovery, etc. All of the talking was done through a translator, but I try my best to look at her and pretend the language barrier doesn't exist. I asked her what she liked to eat and that she could tell me but I probably wouldn't know what it was. I told her that I could bring her chocolate and she said she would love that. I went to a shop and got a small bar of milk chocolate and went back up to the big room. When I went to the shop, I asked Siva if I should just get several for all of the patients in the room, and he said "Are you rich?" and I told him I wasn't but I would like to since the bars were cheap. He said to not 'waste my money'. Even people in the healthcare field (Like the guy who called the people in the leper colony inmates) don't seem too concerned with being passionate to their patients. Maybe just a cultural difference or possibly a lack of compassion. Anyway, I got back up there and she touched my face and was so happy. She gave me a kiss thing (it was very weird) and invited me into her house for tea when she gets out and invited me to share her lunch with her on her bed. I told her I had to catch up with the rest of my group for lunch, but I really appreciated it. She told me she had been suffering and I told her my cousin had suffered once too. I wished her the best in recovery and told her I would pray for her. I hope I made a difference in her day. Here she is.

People eat off of banana leaves here. The will just sit the leaf on the floor and eat off it. I ate off of one in a restaurant. People, especially women, will offer me to eat food with them. I wish I didn't have to be rude and say no, but I know that would cause some serious issues:).

Today our translator that you saw a picture of in our last blog explained to me the touching between men/men and women/women. If a man holds hands with a man it means homosexuality, whereas over the shoulder just means brotherhood. One of the other translators, Siva, asked me today if I had any siblings. I told him I had three sisters. He said "No brothers?" and I said no. He said "I am not your brother?" Here, people call each other brother and sister. When I heard someone talking about one of the nurse superintendents, Rosemary, they called her sister Rosemary.

I ate lychees, a type of fruit, at lunch yesterday. I also had lychee juice today. YUM. Without they skin, they look like flesh. Nothing like a lychee after seeing a surgery:)

I'm really embarrassed about this next little thing. So, I bought some peanut butter at the only american type shop I have found so far, and I was trying to find some bread to eat with it. I wasn't sure if I could find any bread that was safe to eat on the streets so I went down to the hotel desk (because I had eaten bread at breakfast there several mornings in a row) and asked if I could buy a loaf of bread from them. A guy got on the phone and talked in Tamil (pronounced thumber) to someone for quite a while. When he got off he said that the hotel bread was too expensive and that he had SENT someone out to buy me some. In a half hour someone came to my door with my bread and charged me 50 rupees. The actual cost of the bread was 120 rupees and I was only charged 50. I felt so bad. People (most) treat us so well here. If we are standing they will go to all costs to make sure we have chairs to sit in and today we just walked in on a c section. I feel like we get special treatment for no reason. I have nothing more to offer than everyone else around me. It is strange. By the way, the bread was absolutely delicious....

Skin lightening creams are popular here. When I took a picture with Usha, our translator, she was worried about how dark she was going to look next to Emily and me.

After lunch, we went to a school for girls. Three translators went with us, Angana, Siva, and Usha. On the way we went past the college his girlfriend goes to. They all got all giggly like teenagers and he showed me a picture of her on his cell phone. (Cell phones are like $20 here!) We started asking him questions about the marriage (if it was set up....blah blah blah) and Usha told me that boys can't get married in a family until girls are married! One of my friends, Sriya, said her dad's sister was 5 years younger and got married several years before he did. Siva was going to have to wait until his sister got married until he could marry his girlfriend, which could be more than 5 years.

All schools here are all boys or all girls. Today we went to an all girls school and it was so much fun. We just went to observe and talk to the girls, since our stuff was in the process of being printed, but some people have projects in the schools. The girls were just ecstatic to see white people. It made them giggle like they had crushes on us. They could barely focus on the lesson we came to see them learn. The translator told us what they were learning the whole time. The lesson was from the Aparajitha foundation, the one that teaches lessons that aren't taught in normal curriculum. The lesson was over emotions and concentration. They had to go in front of the class a lot and tell a story of when they felt a certain emotion. One girl said (by translation I know this) that she has felt really jealous when her friend had scored higher than her on a test, so she waited until sports later that day and beat her in the game later that day... After the lesson, we asked each other questions. They were really nervous to try to use English in front of us, and one little girl stood up and told me I was very beautiful!!!! Another one told me she liked my dress. (I wasn't wearing a dress:)) We asked them to sing us a song in Tamil and then they asked us to sing our national anthem.... If any of you have heard me sing, oh lord. We couldn't say no so we all just belted it out together. It wasn't beautiful---I hope they don't know what it sounds like! When we had to leave, they all wanted our signatures in their books where they took notes. I wrote my name and little notes for the girls. They were shoving their notebooks at me and the other girls so fast, I couldn't even see the one I was writing on! They were precious. They were all wearing the same uniform and had their hair the same. When I bent down to get a picture with them one of them kissed me! I also realized after I left that I wrote 'Your beautiful' instead of 'You're beautiful' on a few of the girls' notebooks. How embarrassing! I guess I couldn't think with 20293835 notebooks in my face...I took a picture of the girls' feet. It still blows my mind that people don't wear shoes for the most part here. Everything is SO dirty and unsafe. Also, girls wear two anklets. One of the girls in our group wore one anklet to a village yesterday and one woman asked her if she had lost the second one. Emily tried to buy only one anklet at a temple the other day and they said "No, here in India we wear two".

Today when we were walking around town, there were several cows just running around eating out of the trash, whatever---between all of the traffic. It still blows be away how tame they are!

Tomorrow, Sunday, is our day off. I am really excited to get a little sleep, shop, workout, etc. I think we are going to try to get some ladies to come to the hotel to do henna (called mehandi here). We also might go to Avatar in Tamil...:) Hopefully my henna will still be there so you can see it when I get home!

Love ya! Jackie