Building Momentum at Juan Pablo II

The morning started early with reflection questions for the day posed over a bright breakfast of eggs and toast. Dr. Adams led the group in considering the purpose of the trip and what we hoped to accomplish.

Breakfast at Casa del Angel Hostal

After planting seeds for reflection, we packed up, jumped in the bus, and headed through the packed Guatemala streets towards Hospital Materno Infantil de Juan Pablo II!

When they tell you the traffic will take another hour

Hospital Materno Infantil de Juan Pablo II serves low-income mothers and children in Guatemala City. They had accumulated many pieces of malfunctioning or broken medical equipment over the past two years, so the room we carried the pieces to was packed in no time. With plenty of work on our hands, we partnered up, grabbed a device, and set to work on repairing items!  

Getting to work!

Dr. P making use of her resources

Jorie, Cerie, and Katie worked together on a set of three autoclaves, instruments that build up high temperatures and pressures to sterilize medical equipment. They got two of them up and running! The third had a few more problems… it was found in a large container soaked in water. After fixing the water drain and wiping off the significant rust that enveloped the interior, we decided it was time to plug it in and...

The autoclave team

Rhett working on a new pointer for a broken scale

Calibrating and balancing infant scales turned out to be a taller task than expected when Rhett discovered that one of the scales was missing the indicator on the large weight. Instead of letting the scale go to waste he decided to make a new one! We bent a few pieces of scrap metal into shape and then epoxied the new pointer onto the weight. After calibration, the scale worked like a charm!

Overhead view of the internal workings of the ESU

Hunter spent the entire day fighting to revive an electrosurgical unit that was determined to stay dead. The machine is commonly used to perform delicate surgical procedures, and this item in particular was a major priority to the JPII staff, and they were really hoping we could get it up and running for them while we were here! Despite knowing that it wouldn’t turn on, when we first arrived we were very hopeful that we would be able to get it working since we had trained on this exact model of electrosurgical unit. However we quickly realized that it would be trickier than we first expected. The fuses, cable and power switch were all working fine when tested using a multimeter, which indicated that the issue with the unit was somewhere inside the electronic components of the machine. After doing a deep dive into both the service manual and the circuit schematics, he narrowed down the issue to the power supply board at the back of the device, which wasn’t providing the power that the unit needed to operate. Upon this discovery, Hunter along with Rhett removed this board, replaced it with our DC power supply, and SUCCESS! The unit was able to turn on! This victory however was short-lived, as the unit’s interface still wouldn’t respond to inputs, and indicated much more complex problems associated with the logic board. After struggling with the zombie electrosurgical unit for awhile longer, Hunter and Rhett unfortunately had to declare it dead, but not before the device decided to give them some not so kind parting words for disturbing it’s rest.

Parting words from the ESU

Hungry from our first day of medical equipment repairs, we headed off to dinner where we enjoyed delicious Guatemalan cuisine before retreating to Casa de Angel Hotel for journaling and relaxing! It’s been a full day and given us a lot to consider from the equipment we tested and repaired to the Guatemalans we observed going about their day. Time for a recharge and a reboot to be on top of our game for tomorrow. Happy 21st birthday to Stephanie!!

Showing off her engineering and gymnastics skills