The Amazon Medical Project

June, 2006

We were passing Juvencio’s house when he and his wife Olga came across the stream in their dugout, carrying their white dog Sheena. Olga insisted that Sheena had been in perfect health all day, then had suddenly become ill. When they laid her on the ground, she was panting rapidly, was so weak she could not lift her head or her paws, and every now and then was racked by a spasm in her abdomen and legs. The diagnosis was clear ... she had eaten poison (probably left out by someone who was annoyed by the barking of his neighbor’s dogs, a nasty trick but one occasionally practiced here).

Mike Miller, our young US volunteer, raced the half-mile or so to the clinic, returning in marathon time with several vials of atropine and a fistful of syringes. When I had difficulty in knocking the glass top off the vial, and was fearful of breaking the vial and losing the medicine, Juvencio deftly snapped it off. I filled the syringe, injected the drug, and then Juvencio gently massaged Sheena, and carried her up to the house to rest. At this point, without treatment, I estimated she would not live more than about 30 minutes. With treatment, I could not say.

When we returned from the clinic in the late afternoon, three hours later, we climbed the stairs to the house, and Sheena greeted us with a wagging tail and a raised head. Her gait was still pretty wobbly, but she did get to her feet and walk a few steps toward us, and by the next morning, she appeared to be pretty much back to normal.

A little veterinary medicine? – sure, why not?

July, 2006

And then there was the three year old, and the machete, and the moment when everyone’s back was turned (“un descuido,” or “a little carelessness,” readily admitted his father), and then, there was half of the child’s big toe hanging by a thread. Dr. Yuri not only sewed it all back together, but also pinned it, inserting a cut-off needle lengthwise through the toe in order to hold the fragments of bone together as they healed. It was an ingenious arrangement, and when the toddler came back three weeks later to have the pin removed, he was healing.

And then there was the eleven year old boy who took a solid blow to the leg while playing the habitual afternoon soccer game, and came in with his lower leg not only broken, but also with the bone hanging out. This one, we sent on to Iquitos, after stabilizing the fracture and giving antibiotics to prevent infection from setting in.

And then there was the worker at Explorama who happened to be underneath a machete handle when it came down on top of his head (I refrained from inquiring as to exactly how this occurred). He sustained no break in the skin but did develop quite a lump, and is now concerned that the hair in that spot seems to have fallen out entirely. Will it grow back? He anxiously wonders. I tell him I don’t know. He’ll just have to wait and see.

And then there was the man who came in to have a porcupine spine removed from his tongue. Now there was an intriguing history ... had he been licking a porcupine, and if so, why? As it turned out, he had been eating the beast, and although he thought that all the spines had been removed in the skinning process, one had evidently been missed.