I slipped on a scrub top and walked down the hill to the hospital. It was one of my call days, and the nurses had given the characteristic message on the Ham radio, “Dra. Maggi, Dra. Maggi, tenemos una emergeeencia.” They always seemed to draw that last word out, making it sound more urgent than it really was. This case was simple however, a kid with a rash, and I didn’t expect it to take long. I had turned to Mackenzie as I left, just after breakfast, “You don’t think I need to change out of my shorts and flip flops do you?” “Nah,” she replied, “you won’t be gone long.” How long did your child have this? Does it itch? I had made it about two questions into the interview of the child’s mother when I heard a bustle in the other ER bed. Glancing past the curtain, I saw them hoisting a young man with a rather large blood stain spreading down the front of his shirt. “What happened?” Calmly, “Una balla Doctora.” As I could hear the gurgling from his chest from across the room, I turned to the mother and asked her to excuse me for a minute. After two painstakingly small and difficult to place IVs, several liters of fluid, a measly shot of IM toradol, and a large bore chest tube placement, the patient was finally stabilized. Quite a rush of adrenaline, when your trauma bay team initially consists of only two generally trained Honduran nurses, other physicians have to be called in by Ham radio, and the Xray tech has to be called in from afar on his bike (we left a voicemail message on his phone and never actually saw him that day). No tension pneumothorax, no other complications, thankfully, and he did extremely well. The trauma surgeon who came in to help me place the chest tube, a veteran of several tours in duty in Afghanistan, looked at me after all was said and done, stating, “Well will you look at that. You didn’t even get blood on your shorts!” I think that will be my first and last chest tube insertion while in flip flops, for the record. While one of the most intense, the past three weeks have been spent full of similar intriguing learning experiences. I was lucky enough to be able to spend them working at Hospital Loma de Luz, a small but comprehensive missionary hospital approximately two hours south of La Cieba, a large city on the North Coast of Honduras. Typical days were spent in clinic, after rounding on any patients, mothers or babies you had admitted in the days prior. Clinic encounters ran...