new home

me in front of my house

Kitchen

Well, tried to post this blog earlier in the week and on the last picture upload, it deleted everything...so here goes again.
So here are a few pictures of my new house. I am so excited to finally have a place to call mine for a time and to have a place to invite people to.

living room

one of the bedrooms

Fiesta

We use any excuse to party here in Honduras and it always involves food. I think we get that from the Honduran culture we live in. We as missionaries, don't dress up very much, so any occasion to do so is something very special. Saturday night, we had a fun fiesta (party) night to celebrate one of the missionary kid's Sweet 16. They rented out the restaurant of a hotel on the way into La Ceiba for the party. It was a blast with dancing, food, and great fellowship.

Me and Mariah...the birthday girl

New lab baby!!!

One of my employees, Irina, had her second child on Tuesday, a beautiful, healthy baby girl. I was very overjoyed to hear that the two nurses staying with me were able to help deliver her. So, the newest lab baby was born at 2:05am weighing 7lbs. I was able to go see her first thing Tuesday to visit and bring her the baby blanket I had made her. 

me and baby

This baby girl is like many here that are born as recien nacido (newborn) and don't have a name yet. She hopefully will have a name by her 8 day check-up.

Blood Transfusions

Blood transfusions are not a very common thing at Hospital Loma de Luz, but do happen sometimes with critical and unstable patients. Got called into the hospital last night about 8:30 by the on call doc to do some labs on a fairly critical patient. The patient was a 16 year old, 6 days postpartum and weak, pale, high fever, chills with high heart rate and trouble breathing. She had delivered at home with a midwife (usually untrained old ladies, sometimes witch doctors) and the midwife just said she was weak and needed to rest, not saying anything about the fact that she had lost an unreasonable amount of blood during and after delivery.
As soon as I drew her blood, I knew it would be a late night. Her hematocrit was 10%, which is about 1/4 of what her blood volume should be and would need blood as quickly as possible. Her blood type is A negative, not a very common type in the states, but here, very rare. None of our missionaries or Honduran staff are this type.
Since our blood bank is the living, walking, breathing people we are around every day, I didn't have much hope to find blood for her. Luckily she had her sister with her who is the same type. I eventually found a brother and uncle to donate for a total of 3 units. I had to type about 30 people to find the 3 that were the same type as our patient. It was a very long night and very long day today trying to type everyone we could find, hoping they would be able to donate.

Drawing a unit from one of our missionaries...this was one done in the middle of the night.

Luckily she is stable and doing well and now she says ready to go home because she wants to be with her newborn son.