¿Qué le duele hoy?

This past Thursday as a “favor” (it was really no favor at all) for a friend, I served as a translator for a small medical mission team working in nearby Purulhá, Baja Verapaz. The four person medical team came to Guatemala with the organization Partner for Surgery (www.partnerforsurgery.org). Partner for Surgery, or “Compañero En Salud” as it is known here, sends small medical teams to rural Guatemala mainly in the departments of Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz, and El Quiché with the mission of identifying patients that need surgeries and then later performing the surgeries at Las Obras Sociales de Hermano Pedro (OSHP) hospital in Antigua. Because the doctors are only in Guatemala for about a week at a time, Partner in Surgery focuses on operations that require little post-surgery in-hospital stays such as hernias, non-malignant tumors, cleft palates, ovarian cysts, prolapsed uteruses, and gall stones.

Partner in Surgery’s goal is to provide life improving and changing surgeries to the poorest of the poor in rural Guatemala, people who otherwise would not have access to these operations and by no means the resources to pay for them. The surgeries for the patients are virtually free, as they are asked only to donate what they can afford, whether it be 5Q or a bag of corn. This insures that the patients will have a vested interest in the operation they will receive.

I spent the day translating for a gynecologist (and now possess a new set of Spanish vocabulary that I will probably never utilize again here). At first I felt a little uncomfortable asking these timid indigenous women very personal questions, but it didn’t take long before I got really into it. I felt like a detective trying to figure out if the professed symptoms were a sign of a falling uterus, or a cyst on an ovary, or some kind of vaginal infection. Probably to the doctor’s annoyance, I started posing questions before I was told what to ask and would carry on lengthy conversations about symptoms before stopping to relay the information back to him.

More than just communicating information between the doctor and patient, though, I really served to try to make the women as comfortable as possible and put them at ease. Most of these women had never had a pelvic exam before, and an already unpleasant exam was rendered even more uncomfortable for them since a foreign male who they couldn’t understand was performing it. I took pains to explain to the women exactly what the doctor was going to do during the exam before he did it.

About a handful of women had fallen uteruses or ovarian cysts and were referred to have surgery. The most heartbreaking case, however, was something for which we (as if I am a doctor) could not do anything. A young indigenous woman in her twenties came in hoping to have her tubal ligation operation reversed. She had her tubes tied after having the desired amount of children with her husband, but her husband had just recently died, and she wanted the ability to get pregnant again.

In rural indigenous Guatemala, a woman’s value as a wife is tied to her ability to bear children. Few, if any, men would marry a woman knowing that she couldn’t have kids. And in a society where economic opportunities for women are extremely limited, it will be very difficult for her to provide a living for herself and children on her own.
Her face went blank and her eyes began to fill with tears as I delicately as possible told her that the operation could not be undone. I can’t imagine the pain and despair she must have felt when those words left my mouth. I can’t imagine it, because my value as a woman will never be tied to having children. I can’t imagine it, because my desire to get married will never be tied to economic assurance. I can’t imagine it, because I am a privileged American.