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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.
 
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