Huejotzingo

This morning Dra. Magda took me to the hospital at Huejotzingo (pronounced wah-hot-sing-go). Her son who goes to UDLAP went with us and we met her husband who is an anesthesiologist at the hospital. One of the doctors gave me a tour. Wow, I thought Betania was bad. I thought the nursing homes I've worked in were bad. This hospital made any other place on earth look like heaven. It was probably about the size of the house I grew up in. There were people everywhere. Sitting in the hallways, on the floor in the waiting room, even in the street out front, waiting for care. Everything smelled bad; like dirty laundry and bad cafeteria food. The tour started with consult where there were two or three families packed into one exam room and a single nurse taking all of the vitals. The hospital provides dental care because there are no dentists in Huejotzingo or surrounding towns. The inpatient ward was pretty depressing. I'm not sure how many beds there were but there were at least 10 rooms with 3 or 4 beds per room. And for all the patients in the hospital there were two closet-sized bathrooms behind the nurses station-one for women and one for men. My bedroom is bigger than any of the patient rooms, and my bathroom is bigger than the pediatric rooms. In one of the pediatric rooms there was a crib with an abnormally small baby and the mom, lying on the floor and sleeping with her upper body hugging a metal chair. The delivery room was a hallway that supposedly led to an operating room somewhere. There were at least three new moms in beds stuck in corners of the hallway. And then there was a matching hallway "nursery" with three tiny, premature babies. The kitchen was the cleanest part of the hospital and probably the roomiest, with only two cooks. All of the laundry at Huejotzingo is done by one little old lady. Everything in the hospital was small, and cramped and every single space was packed with people. The director told me that the hospital needed to expand, but the government will not allow them to build another floor or give them any money. And even if the hospital was bigger, there still would not be enough doctors or nurses to see all of the patients. This is the issue in Mexico, the opposite of the issue in the United States: in the U.S. there are doctors but patients do not have/cannot afford care. In Mexico there are patients who receive care from the state, but there are no doctors.

After the hospital we went with one of the nurses to her home nearby. We sat in her cool, tile kitchen and talked about the public health situation around Huejotzingo. The hospital serves a huge area that reaches out into the country where there are no other clinics. Alot of patients come from up in the mountains where people are very poor, illiterate, and many live in crates. They can't afford filtered water, food, or medications. Because many of them are uneducated or simply can't afford contraceptives they end up with alot of kids...some as many as 15. And then they end up in the waiting room at Huejotzingo where they may wait for days to see a doctor. The doctors and nurses here are really good; they care about their patients and about the situation here and work very hard, but they can't do all that needs to be done. Huejotzingo made me sad, even though I had expected a similar situation. I think it made me sad because I felt helpless. I'm not a doctor, but I there's alot I could do at the hospital. I just wanted to get into a pair of scrubs and jump in.

My favorite part of the hospital was the "morgue"...basically like a concrete closet with a metal door and padlock. It was about 5 feet square and well hidden in a corner of an outdoor hallway. I never would have noticed it if the doctor hadn't pointed it out. I must have looked surprised because he reassured me that they never left bodies in there for more than a few hours...or a day...