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At seventeen years, Sean could never have imagined himself as a doctor committed to practicing in an under-served community and making medical missions to foreign countries. Now he is 27 years old and a soon to be graduate of Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine. Sean studied chemical engineering before deciding to emerge from the cocoon of a chemistry lab, become a doctor, and interact with people in need: one on one.
As a third-year medical student Sean was assigned to Dr. Dwight Bailey’s rural health clinic in the foothills of Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains. It was here that he first envisioned the possibilities ahead of him—a life devoted to serving the poor, living in a small town, and raising kids. Today he fast forwards to Macusani.
Juana is just one of the dozens upon dozens of patients that Sean sees on Thursday, the fifth day of the clinics that began in Llalli and now have arrived at Macusani, 15,500 feet above sea level. Juana’s life is typical for the patients who come to the clinics. Forty-two years old, with seven kids—from the baby on her back to a twenty-two-year-old son—all living at home, Juana’s husband died while she was pregnant with her last child. She raises potatoes on a one acre patch of ground. She is otherwise unemployed, but her eldest son works in the uranium mine and helps his family survive. Juana walked 1 ½ hours to reach the “Gringos” clinic. She heard it was free.
Juana tells Sean that she has a bad smell in her mouth, which is dry all night. She is often angry, has severe headaches and feels tired from daylight to dark. Sean quickly and efficiently diagnoses Glossitis which involves a vitamin B deficiency and causes dry mouth. He prescribes multivitamins and Paxil for depression. Juana’s eyes spill over with gratitude when she promises Sean she will return the next day with the rest of her children. She leaves with a hope—born of faith in a baby-faced gringo who took the time to listen and care.
The next morning, forty-seven-year-old Louisa struggles with embarrassment as she describes to Sean that her colon pr  olapses as she strains to defecate. The youngest child is the two-year-old on her back and the eldest is twenty-six. She has eleven children in all. The Quechua women from the mountains often deliver babies until they reach menopause.
As the exam proceeds, she tells “Doctor” Sean that she just found out that her husband is sick. It seems he was defending their home and their 100’ x 100’ potato patch from robbers. Knocked to the ground, one man kicked his boot into her husband’s stomach. When he had recovered enough, they walked the two hours to the town doctor. Louisa begins to tremble as she tells Sean what she has recently learned. Her husband’s stomach pain is not from the bandit’s boot, but from cancer.
Sean prescribes steroid cream for Louise’s hemorrhoids, vitamins, a worm pill, and again, Paxil for what must certainly be depression. He asks her to return the next day with her other children, “No,” she said “I need to care for my husband.”
Even without Louisa’s children, the next day’s line of patients fills the clinic courtyard—it never seems to shorten. Each has a story to tell and “Doctor” Sean listens, diagnoses their medical problems, and prescribes antibiotics, pills to ward off depression, worm medicine, vitamins, and hopeful words of encouragement to the troubled souls that sit patiently on the exam table. He is an awfully long way from the chemistry lab at Virginia Tech.
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