Oct 8

For those of you that don't know, I have been teaching a class called Family Life. In Guyana, family life refers to basically any kind of relationship type stuff (dating, marriage, and actual family stuff). I have been basing my class on what makes up a healthy Christian dating relationship as most of the students are still very much in that stage of their lives. It's been going alright, I just wish I was more creative.

So anyway, I gave my first quiz and quickly found out that the students detest T/F questions. Apparently they are just too tricky! Good thing I only put two of them down!

This week I had my first experience working with Lila, a middle aged lady with cervical cancer. Since BMMC is a Medical college, part of the director's dream was to house patients to give the students some real practical experience. Miss Lila is the first patient the college has had the privilege of working with.

Lila will be here for about a month receiving natural remedy treatments. It's kind of cool for the students to be getting some practical experience with a patient while they are here. Perhaps not so cool for me. It is certainly a test in humbleness for me. I have been fighting nursing my whole life. It just doesn't appeal to me. I wish it did, there are so many people that need care! Doing these treatments with Lila is not my cup of tea, but I definitely have done my best to get beyond my selfish nature and help this dear lady no matter how uncomfortable it might make me.

Lila is on a special liquid diet so whoever is assigned to work with her on a given day must prepare and deliver her various drinks every hour. She has a blended fruit drink, a blended vegetable drink, and a broth that we give to her throughout the day. I asked her how they are and she said they aren't bad at all. Her body is certainly responding well to the wholesome diet.

On my assigned day I also helped with her treatments. She does a hydrotherapy treatment where she must sit in a hot, hot tub of water for 30 minutes. We drape a sheet over her at the same time to give a sauna effect by trapping the heat in. The heat is actually suppose to kill cancer cells. That's cool! I feel bad for her though. Guyana is hot enough, but then to be sitting for any length of time in hot water must be torture. She does very well though. She is very eager to do anything to combat her cancer. We keep a cool towel wrapped around her head during the process, so hopefully that helps a bit.

Next treatment is a salt scrub where she gets rubbed down with a salty paste. This is for basic health and comfort. The salt apparently helps to open the pores in the body and makes the patient feel nice all over. One of the girls who teaches here, Anca, was telling me something interesting about the sanitarium she worked in before she came here. She said that there were several patients there who suffered from depression. Nothing seemed to help them except this salt scrub. Perhaps it's the beauty of the personal touch on top of the medicinal benefits that made this work. Who knows. At any rate, it does seem to help with general happiness, so why not!

Later on we apply a charcoal poultice that gets wrapped around Lila's abdominal area for at least an hour. I don't know much about charcoal as I have never tried more than about two charcoal tablets in my whole life. But the things I hear about it are absolutely amazing! Charcoal basically acts as a magnet, attracting toxins from the body out. So while the charcoal may not do anything necessarily for the cancer itself, it can sure help Lila with other areas of discomfort. She was telling me that before she came here she was having a miserable time with gas pains. After one night with the charcoal poultice, her gas pains were gone. Hooray for charcoal!