Last Clinic Day

What a whirlwind of a last day! Only partly due to the fact that I was running at about 60%! I had yet another translator, so I got to learn their unique words for translating (difficulties smelling is actually difficulties breathing, in case you were curious). We also had another teammate get sick so we were down to just me in triage. Which meant that I got to see every single patient! Cool! Exhausting! Humbling!

Triage desk all to myself 😬

The best story of the day by far was joyfully recounted by a newer refugee who has only been in the country six months. She’s a Christian who was thrown out by her family and fled Syria. The guards tried to hold her, but couldn’t keep her down. Most amazingly of all though, they tried to shoot at her so she wouldn’t cross the border and they shot point blank three times. She told us that each of those bullets fell to the ground at her feet!! The Lord is still doing miracles every day!

Really, no story can top that one ;) but my other highlight of the day had to be my blood pressure buddy. This guy came in on the first day looking for a tooth extraction but his blood pressure was through the roof, so we couldn’t operate that day. We gave him some meds to lower it and told him to come back the next day. It was still too high the next day so we told him to come back Wednesday. But then we ran out of slots on Wednesday so we told him to come back on the final day. Today, we were able to pull his tooth!!! But I’d been seeing him literally every single day and getting his blood pressure every day and so we were besties.

He spoke the tiniest bit of English, so I ran up to him on the last day and said “tooth gone?” And he said yes! So we smiled and hugged and said goodbye for the final time. It’s so unusual to have a familiar face all week long and he was a kind face (even if he looked a little beat up on the last day from his extraction ;))

We also had a bunch of teens in today for some reason. They spoke a bit of English so we got to joke back and forth a bit more than normal, and I did some basic checkup stuff for some of the staff, which I always enjoy. There was also a young lady who was the sister of one of the staff who found out she was pregnant like literally the day before and she excitedly showed me ultrasounds of her seven week baby (it was a very cute blob, in case you were wondering)

As the last day of clinic came to a close, triage finished up first as you’d expect. After puttering around for a bit, I was starting to get wiped out and so I just sat near-ish to the chaos so I could be called upon if the need arose. I got to chatting with our host who I hadn’t spoken to much up until this point. Something about trying to keep 15 Americans alive kept him very busy ;) he’s a really cool dude and I so wish I had gotten to talk to him sooner! At one point he whipped out a paper and pen and started showing me his Arabic calligraphy which was incredibly beautiful and looks nothing like the regular script! He even did my name! (Read right to left, remember)

At the very end of the night, as we stood on the cool porch listening to the call to prayer, we said tearful goodbyes to all of our new friends. Since I had a different translator each day, I didn’t get the deep connection that a lot of my teammates did, but I do know pretty much all of the translators, so that was special for me.

With the tobacco and coffee grounds smoking to keep the mosquitoes away, a hummus recipe secured, and equipment packed up, we waved one final time and headed back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep before our journey home. Bags empty, bodies tired, and hearts full.