Medical updates + bugs

N___, the wife of L___, the night watchman, did not survive her massive stroke.  Her body was brought back to Santa Clotilde last night for the velorio and the entierro.  She was waked in her home last night.  Her coffin was white, with a glass window on the top, surrounded by white candles burning steadily in the warm jungle night.  I glanced briefly at the deceased, wanted to be respectful but not intrusive.  I thought that her swollen features might be blamed on her time in the ICU, but others at the wake knew enough to be worried about decomposition.  “Do we have time to wait until Thursday for the burial, until her son arrives from Cajamarca?” It was Tuesday night.  Yolanda, one of the cooks at the hospital and the aunt of the deceased, whispered to me, “She is already swollen; we don’t want her to smell; no queremos que se reviente.”

They asked Ana for some formalin from the hospital; in their haste to return to Santa Clotilde, the family had forgotten to have her body treated with formalin.    I talked briefly with William and Marco Antonio, the two new doctors from Lima who have arrived to replace Ana, about the logistics of injecting a corpse with formalin.  William said he knew how to do it; I wondered if I could Google it.  Ana said the technicians at the hospital knew how to do it.

But it turned out that we had only a small quantity of formalin at the hospital, enough to send off an occasional biopsy specimen, but not enough protect a woman’s body from decay while awaiting the arrival of her son.

O__, the two year old boy with the prolonged fevers and the uncertain diagnosis, absconded from the hospital before we could transfer him to the hospital in Iquitos.  His mother said she had to get her other kids to bring them for their control on Monday.  Patients here receive a certain amount of money from the government for bringing their kids in for well-child visits and for prenatal care; K___ could not afford to miss being paid for the control of her kids.  She smiled sheepishly when I saw her in clinic the following week with O___ and his twin brother, who was much bigger and healthier than O___.  She said that O___ was still having fevers, but that she had brought him to a curandero.  “Bad spirits,” she confided in me.  I quizzed her about the fevers, “Yes, he is still having fevers, but they are better,” she told me.  “I am treating him with baths of warm urine.”  She must have seen the look in my face; “Orina de mujer,” she clarified, as if that made it so much more comprehensible.  I was reminded of my taxi driver in Lima, who had talked to us about the jungle delicacy called zuri.  It is a little worm that lives in the trees; it is eaten fried, and apparently quite tasty.  I asked the taxi driver, “So you ate this worm?”  “Es us gusano del aire, no vive en la tierra,” he explained.  Earthworms are dirty, tree grubs are OK.

Everywhere, there is traditional medicine.  Some patients have pock-marked cloths adhered to their abdomens.  “Plant medicine,” they assure me.  And there are beautiful datura plants everywhere, known here as Toe (accent over the “e”) sometimes used in ayahuasca ceremonies, sometimes used in other illnesses, sometimes causing poisonous side effects.

Also, some really interesting and beautiful bugs here!

beautiful bug with reddish body

very interesting little bug!

tarantula in our house!

big spider in our bathroom

typical “plant medicine” applied to abdomen