Discouragement was evident on my face. But my first patient was a little 2 year old girl who smiled and hugged me when I walked in. So, we worked for a few hours, seeing as many patients as we could, and then we packed up and returned to the hotel. All in all the trip from Ocho Rios to Accompong town took longer than our plane ride from New York to Jamaica, and we did it twice in the same day. But as tired as I was, I felt, more than any other clinic day, that I had begun to truly earn this MD degree.
Doctors are first and foremost, servants.
We are supposed to put the well being of our patients above our own personal interests. And there were people in Accompong town who really needed us. I realized that aside from whatever physicians might be in the area, it's probably not often that health care workers make that trek up the mountain to care for the sick and needy. So we really did something good today. This is the reason that we came to Jamaica in the first place.