Day One!

We had a REALLY long day yesterday - first day at the clinic screening patients, which was quite an experience. The clinic used to be a three story home that is now being rented by Jeremiah's Hope - and is very well organized. We all had to leave our shoes at the front door and spend the day working barefoot, which was hilarious! At left is Kevin, notice all the shoes at the door! At right we are in the main office displaying our footwear for the day..

We saw a lot of patients that had been pre-screened for us. Several  had cancers too advanced for us to be able to help. Very very sad - and to have to tell them we could do nothing for them was terrible. But we were able to find a good number of cases that should really benefit from surgery. We are doing two tomorrow that came from provinces three or four hours away, leaving their farms and bringing remaining family members to help care for them - since all the post-op recovery at night is done by the families.

Here's a photo of the laundry facility at the clinic, and the lovely fence 'protecting' our back patio.

We've got wonderful young medical and nursing students helping us translate, and my French is coming in very handy since most of the lab values and echo/radiology results provided for us are in French...But I don't know if I'll ever get down the Khmer language - very difficult! I've got to go now, but will post more when I get a moment. Very  busy day ahead of us, I think - since we have to get organized for the surgeries tomorrow.