Intro to Hospital del Niño

I had my first day at Hospital del Niño this morning. It's a teaching hospital, so there were a lot of people at rounds... and of course, it was all in Spanish. I think maybe my head hurts sometimes not from the altitude, but from concentrating so hard on what everyone is saying to me. Anyway, we started in the infectious diseases ward (Infectología) and then went to the respiratory medicine wing (Neumología). There was a child in Infectología that had been living there for 3 years. He was found in a plaza (like Plaza Murillo to the left) nearly dead when he was 2. The doctors diagnosed him with myelodysplasia. I couldn't understand how they had treated him or why they would keep someone in his condition in an infectious disease ward, but he had recently needed an operation on an abscess in his neck, so I think his health problems must be ongoing. On the other hand, it seemed a little like they just didn't have anywhere else to put him.

The other interesting case in Infectología was a 9 year-old girl with lesions all over her body. Her mother claimed that she had had a fever for over 3 months and had recently developed a cough. It felt like an episode of House... all the doctors stood around discussing the possibilities, while the head doctor kept insisting that the mom was wrong about the details (¿Estás segura? No te creo, no te creo). The dermatologist thought that it was a bad case of chicken pox, but the head doctor thought it was monkeypox. Huh? Yeah, I looked that one up.

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The picture to the right was taken this evening (I walked around after Spanish class ended at 5). You can't really make it out very well in the picture, but it's a long alley of stalls that sell books. There are street vendors for everything you can possibly imagine - some of them specialize and some of them don't (you can make a phone call, buy toilet paper, get a bottle of coca-cola, and pick out some earrings at a lot of them). But this particular spot is just a bunch of "book vendors." It feels medieval, but modern... a little like City of Lost Children - but a lot lighter outside and not an evil plot at work. So maybe it's not the same. Ah well, I tried to explain it and I failed.