A typical day for us begins around 7:30 am, waking up and eating some breakfast. For me that is usually toast with peanut butter and some juice. We walk down to the bus station, and usually wait anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, as the buses are not always reliable. Once getting to the hospital, we go down to the locker rooms to get our lab coats and put away our things. Next, we would go find our doctors, in their respective departments. Many times, we would begin our day by sitting in on a department meeting, where the doctors discuss patients and what the schedule is for the day. Next, we would usually do rounds with them, where they would just check in with each patient every morning and see how they were doing. This is a very important part of the doctors’ job because it helps the patients feel like they are not being forgotten. If we were in a consultation-based department such as pediatrics, Neurology or Internal Medicine, we would sit in and listen as the doctors met with patients and diagnosed them. If we were in a surgery-based department such as orthopedics, anesthesiology or general surgery we would head to the Operating Room and change into scrubs. In the Operating Room we would see a wide array of surgeries from hip replacements to mastectomies, to circumcisions.
This would last usually until around 1 or 2, where we would either go to the hospital cafeteria for lunch or go back to the hostel and make some sandwiches. After the hospital, we had the rest of the day to ourselves to explore the city, go to the beach and do whatever we wanted. Sometimes there was a nap fit in there somewhere because we had long days, but usually we would go down to the beachfront for dinner. Two times a week we would have an Atlantis dinner, where our site manager Madalena would take us to a great restaurant and show us different parts of the area. After dinner, I would always try to head to the best ice cream place in the world (at least in my opinion), Santini’s. My favorite was a scoop of strawberry and a scoop of lemon. All the fruit flavors were made with actual fruit which I loved.
After that we would head back to the hostel, sometimes have a little snack, and we would settle in for a movie. While there we watched Jurassic Park, Chasing Mavericks and Spiderman. If we didn’t watch a movie we would spend time getting to know each other and discovering more about one another. My favorite thing to do was to go up on the roof and watch the sunset, every single night they were beautiful, there was never a bad one. It was always very calming to me to be able to smell the ocean, while listening to music and watching the amazing colors all over the sky. After that we would go to bed and get ready to do everything again the next day. WC:512
