Cirugías Plasticas

The plastic surgery campaign was last week. It was a junk show. The team was totally unorganized-they lost the prosthetic ears for a day or two, they didn´t have enough of their own supplies, and dealing with post-op was a disaster. To top it off, the pathologist we use in Cusco informed Guido (the clinic owner/director) that he had misdiagnosed a patient after Guido had told his family that he had cancer (his tumor was benign). Guido called him an asshole, and a few other choice words, I´m sure. On the bright side, I saw a bunch of cool surgeries-Microtia repair, bone grafts, skin grafts, cleft lips and palates, burn patients, and tumor removals. I scrubbed in on a surgery to remove a mass above the eye of a patient who had had multiple head traumas in her life. Although I just held retractors in different positions, it was quite the experience to get in there and be a part of the surgery. The doctors were super nice guys and loved teaching us about anesthesiology and the surgeries. I plan on keeping in touch...

Which brings me to my next story. A 2 year-old boy came into the clinic with a huge tumor-type growth in his face, just below his eye to below his chin. It compromised his mouth so much that his teeth were warped in different directions, and he barely had space to fit food into his mouth (although he had no way to keep it in there as he couldn´t close his lips). It had closed his eye and caused some vascular swelling on his cheek. It was huge. While taking a biopsy, the doctor could barely put the needle in because of the boney structure of the mass. The question loomed: does the team do the surgery here, or try to find a way to get the boy to the states? With the possibility of severe blood loss without a sufficient supply to replentish it during surgery, as well as uncertainty of adequate follow-up led the team to decide to try to do the surgery in the states. Most of the team is from OHSU, and after a few days of phone calls and emails, progress is being made to do the surgery pro-bono at Doernbecher´s Childrens Hospital at OHSU. As I´m returning to the states next week, I hope to be around when the boy and (hopefully) his father arrive in Portland to help them negotiate the craziness of a new country, a foreign language, and of course the surgery. Without this surgery, it is likely that this child will die. And of course, his family lives in a small community in the mountains near here and has barely enough money to catch the bus to get to the clinic. I hope that there´s a way for this boy to receive the surgeries he needs to live.