Is There a Nurse in the House?

One of my main jobs here is that of being the mission "nurse." So far I've dealt with quite a wide range of problems...sprains, headaches, flu, kidney stones, ear aches, head lice, appendicitis, cuts, acne, live bugs in feet and dead bugs in ears, not to mention heinous rashes and some of the more unmentionalble things that come up in a foreign country. Now that I think about it, a lot of medical problems are slightly unmentionable. It has surprised me that I have actually been able to talk with missionaries about some of these things and still have them look me in the eye the next time I saw them. (I, also, try to maintain eye contact.)

At first I felt totally lost when the missionaries would call. I really didn't know much about health and medicine to begin with and I really didn't know the Portuguese names for such things. But then the first mission secretary put together a sweet little binder for me with answers to common problems that he got from the web md website. He thought he was so funny when he titled it, "How to Save a Missionary's Life." A few weeks later I got a really good information packet from the Church doctors in Sao Paulo that had even more info and the names of things in Portuguese. I use it all the time.

Now we have two doctors, instead of just one, that work out of Sao Paulo and help with health problems in all the missions in Brazil. One of them even speaks Portuguese and will call the Brazilian elders if I need him too. They are great. Their reports back to me even supply us with quite a bit of confusion and a little humor.

We have received quite a few reports addressed to our mission, but about missionaries that are serving in some other mission. Or we get reports with one of our missionary's names on it with a diagnosis for a problem he doesn't have. Last week I had to call one of our missionaries to see if he really had cut his finger and had stitches and needed pain medication. I hadn't heard a word about it before the email report came and I figured it was for an elder in another mission with the same last name. But the fact that the elder's first, middle, and last name were exactly the same as our elder's, I decided I'd better check. Our elder was fine. He hadn't been cut, or had stitches or need pain medication and didn't have a clue how his name got mixed up in it. I don't know what happened either. I didn't want to call the doctor and embarrass him.

We got one today that was ours though. All the information on it was even right. It was the "doctor talk" that made us laugh. Poor Elder X.....He has a small bean shaped lesion on the upper portion of his leg near the buttock...... We must be easily entertained or just a little sick, but the word buttock, gets us everytime.