Post 18 Medical Incidents

Unless there was a doctor doing his time of national military service with the army, it was not usual to have any trained medical help in the town.  

Just a few months after going to San Joaquin I developed an abscess on a large molar, and Jim had to rise to the occasion and extract the tooth.  This was the second time he had come to my help.  

In Totora the local chemist/dentist had snapped off a molar at gum level and sent me away saying that he could do no more for me.  While the anaesthetic still had some effect, Jim had removed the roots! 

So when he heard the news in March that a dentist had moved into two rooms along the other end of our building, we were glad to make his acquaintance. He was an Austrian Jew with a Bolivian wife and being a foreigner he was not allowed to practise in the cities in competition with the national dentists, so visited out-of-the-way places.  

It was a great opportunity to have our teeth checked over; and we also gave him a Bible which he seemed to be interested in reading.  We enjoyed the friendly contact with him as a European, and as a neighbour. 

Editors' comment:

Jim had taken a basic short course in dentistry, before leaving Australia for Bolivia, knowing he would go to a remote region in Bolivia.

Without studying the map, considering the isolation in a physical sense, and the difficulty of travel and communication in this region, it’s very hard in today's connected world, to grasp just how remote this little town was in those days.

One Saturday afternoon there was an urgent request for me to go and see a teenage girl in labour with her first baby.  She was the granddaughter of Don Bonifacio, a professed believer who was beginning to take an open stand for the Lord.  

On arrival at the small house on the edge of the town, I found the small room crowded with women, and one of them was officiating as a midwife.  Her only qualification was that she herself had given birth to a baby in the hospital at Trinidad, so considered that she knew everything necessary. 

As was the practice with this type of village midwife, at the start of labour she had given the patient an injection of Pituitrin, and by doing so, she had brought on complications. 

At the time I was five months pregnant but managed to keep going late into the evening doing all that could be done in such circumstances, but I knew that the only hope was to get medical help. There was no doctor in the town, but early the next morning a plane was going through to Guayaramerin. 

So Jim and I advised Don Bonifacio to get his granddaughter to hospital, knowing that he could afford the plane trip because he owned some cattle.  

The next day we called around to their home and found a dying baby and a very sick young mother.  In the early hours of the morning the old grandfather who was considered an expert in dealing with cows who had difficulty in calving had manually removed the baby. Life was very cheap in those days.