Section 3
Before I actually worked overseas, I also thought I needed to know how to do a lot of procedures. There are a number of procedures one can do one the field, but I learned that it’s best to learn on the equipment one has on hand in the field.
In Ecuador, our gastroscope (the scope for looking into stomachs) was incredibly old. It didn’t have a TV camera like scopes in any US hospital. We looked through a tiny window the size of a microscope eye piece. It didn’t even have air insufflation, the part that blows up the stomach so the doctor can see what’s in there. We had to blow air down the suction port of the scope with a nebulizer, one of the breathing machines used for an asthma attack. Any amount of training with state of the art equipment in the developed world would have been just about worthless with our barely functional scope. Learning on the job with the equipment on hand was the best way to learn.
