47. The horrible agony of a doctor

Every morning the doctor took the opportunity to run from San Medardo to Santo Tomas, for a distance of just over three kilometers, and upon reaching Santo Tomas, she arrived at the place where the bus or station waited, which took her on Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday to Las Gaviotas and Tuesday and Thursday to El FARO.

While the bus arrived, he took the opportunity to eat an onions, which allowed him to resist until 5 in the afternoon, when he returned from Las Gaviotas, where there was nowhere to eat, he could only have a soda with bread at noon to continue working. In El Faro, she always ate at the same restaurant, where the doctors from the Ministry of Health sub-center also ate.

On the bus, the most pleasant thing was to travel with the dentist, who was a person over 60 years old, Fulmer García, a die-hard fan of Barcelona de Guayaquil, who lived or died when his love team won or lost.

Máxima, she considered the bus that arrived to San Miguel or the station wagon that she took to Las Gaviotas, a social laboratory where she could see the social behavior of the people of this San Miguel canton, where she was working again.

As always, the buses were a prolonged concert of calf, crying music, which she hated, of romantic songs that she tolerated more and of the unbearable narcocorrido.

After a bad dental work that was done in Quito, her bite changed, making it difficult for her to bite into meat. She impatient as she bit over and over again a piece of meat, that she was hard, she swallowed it but she choked.

She felt that she was short of breath and that she was dying. The people of the restaurant from the owner of her came to help her but she hit him on the back, while she was dying. She went out into the street and before getting into a car that would take her to the San Miguel hospital, she received one last blow from a burly man on her back, which made her more difficult.

In the San Miguel hospital, the maneuvers to expel the piece of meat did not work for her and they sent her to the Social Security hospital in La Esperanza. She always tried to be face down on the way while she drowned.

In emergencies what she said to her patients happened, she was treated by a medical student who was lost and then by a gay doctor.

"You can't see anything in her throat," she said after examining with a tongue depressor, "it must be a reflection of her, and she applied dental anesthetic to her throat, which complicated the clinical picture.

She stumbled off the gurney she occupied and took oxygen from a neighboring bed, and she lay on her stomach while she spit out like never before, to avoid aspiration pneumonia, and inhaled oxygen.

Almost without being able to speak she called the doctor who stupidly put the anesthetic in her throat and made him listen to her throat with the stethoscope.

-Listen please, she will hear that the air is not circulating and there was a bubbling.

The doctor listened and confirmed that there was obstruction, sent her to the operating room. But the gastroenterologist, who was a classmate of her father in college, was not on duty.

The anesthesiologist, a Venezuelan, sedated her and performed an instrumental examination. When she woke up she was following the problem.

She was in the room where the dentist and her assistant from Las Gaviotas y vida de ella came to visit her.

"We have to use a gastroscope and forceps or push the piece of meat to the stomach," said the gastroenterologist who was a friend of her father. "But the hospital does not have a gastroscope."

- Who has a gastroscope in La Esperanza? She-she managed to ask her almost drowning, after almost 16 hours of agony.

- Me, but in my office.

At that time they took her to transfer her to the private gastroenterologist's office, then the director of the La Esperanza Health Network arrived, who helped her so that her insurance would pay for what she would do in her private office.

When she arrived at the dispensary, her mother also arrived, who, upon learning of her, came from Quito to accompany her.

The procedure was simple, the gastroenterologist pushed the piece of meat to the stomach and immediately he was able to breathe normally again. It was like coming back to life. A wonderful moment, after 16 hours of agony.

For Máxima that she lived through that prolonged agony and that she miraculously survived.

The fact that the Insurance does not have an operational gastroscope and that the hospital gastroenterologist does, but in his office and that patients have to pay their gastroenterologist for the consultation in his private office, something that was prevented by the director from the Rural Health Network, reminded him of what his father told him, that when he did the internship in La Esperanza, the doctors damaged or contaminated the operating rooms, stole the radiographic plates, so that the patients would pay him for the x-rays or for operations in his private clinics.

But she saved her life when she for many hours she saw death very close to her and the gratitude to her father's friend for saving her was for life.