So much has been happening that I haven’t been able to talk
about, so let me give you an update on where things are at, aboard the ship! In
the first 5 weeks of surgery we have provided 204 surgeries to 193 people. I
did the math and that means that each surgeon does, on average, 2-3 surgeries a
day. However, the number of surgeries per surgeon usually varies day to day,
for example, when Dr.Gary performs a 12 hour surgery. Surgery times vary
drastically based on the case and specialty. Of those 204 surgeries, 50 were maxillofacial
surgeries, 69 were reconstructive plastic surgeries, 81 were general surgeries
and 4 were ambulatory surgeries. Ambulatory surgeries are same day surgeries,
or surgeries that don’t require an overnight hospital stay, and typically no
anesthesia (I had to look that up). Our amazing statistician (one of his many
roles) keeps such good stats that we know how many children vs. adults had
surgery (79 children, 114 adults), how many men vs. women had surgery (130 men,
63 women) and how many came from Cotonou vs. elsewhere (104 from Cotonou, 89
elsewhere). I find this last number pretty amazing because so far we’ve only
done screening in Cotonou, so that means those 89 people came here from other places, with the hope that we could help them.
Of the 50 maxfax surgeries that we have done so far, 10 of
those have been cleft lip/palate repairs. One of these surgeries has been on
Israel, an adorable 8 month old with a beautiful smile. Him and his mom have
been discharged after his successful surgery and are back in their village now – about 2 hours away. Israel’s stay with us was rather short, only
spending 5 days on the ward. Our plastics patients on the other hand,
spend much longer with us. They go through many bandage changes, followed by
extensive rehabilitation. Our first round of plastic surgeries will finish this
week, with the second round beginning in January. In the meantime, we have lots
of adorable children in various casts, running around the wards, dancing and
playing. One of these cuties is Faith, a beautiful 3 year old girl with burns
on her feet. She’s been with us for almost a month now and still has a ways to
go before she is discharged.
When explaining general surgeries to guests, I typically
only mention goiters and hernias, but general surgery also includes non facial
tumours. An example of this is Wassiale, who had a lipoma, which is a benign
tumour made of fatty tissue, on her neck. This beautiful mom of 4 kids was
admitted, had surgery, and was discharged in a span of two weeks. She was able
to go home to her family, noticeably transformed on the inside and the outside.
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| The path that our screening team will take this week. |
Our Dental team has already seen over 1000 patients in the
first 5 weeks that they’ve been at work, with around 400 people lining up every
day Monday to be screened. Our Eye team started screening last Tuesday, and I
haven’t yet heard how that’s going but I’m hoping to go this week and find out!
They are finding patients for when they begin to operate in January. Our
screening team is gone up country this week, holding screenings in three
different cities further north in Benin: Kandi, Bembèrèké and Parakou. One of the
National Geographic teams has gone with them to capture all the excitement.
This year, they tested a new method for finding patients. They sent trained
local crew throughout the country to make contacts with local leaders such as
church leaders, imams, government officials, etc. and let them know that
patients could come register with them to be seen at screening. Using a
specially designed app, the local crew is able to get all the necessary
information, take a picture, and send it to a member of the screening team on
the ship who could immediately access and let them know whether or not they
could be seen at the surgeon screening. It’s an interesting way of screening
and I’m curious to hear feedback on how the processed worked.
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| Our very own Kat Sotolongo made this beautiful graphic! |
Our Medical Capacity Building team has also been hard at
work, putting on various courses. In the first 5 weeks of service, they have
taught a SAFE Obstetric Anesthesia course, a Primary Trauma Care course and run
a few sterile processing courses (how to properly clean surgical instruments
after surgery – very important). The training courses also include a ‘Train the
Trainers’ day, where some of the participants are taught how to teach the
course to others, so that the knowledge can be passed on. So far 142 people
have participated in these courses. The MCB team has also started their WHO
Checklist project, which is a small team of people that travel to different
hospitals throughout the country and teach them the WHO Checklist for safe
surgery, which is proven to decrease operating room mortality by nearly 50%. Over
the course of the field service our team plans to teach the checklist to
representatives from 35 different hospitals in Benin. On top of this, the MCB
has worked with the Ministry of Health to set up one on one mentoring onboard
the ship with our surgeons and Beninois surgeons. Between vision trip guests,
Nat Geo, Comms and surgeons being mentored, the OR sure has its hands full of
visitors!
Add to this our Agricultural training course that will be
starting in a few weeks, the 18 patients that our palliative care team has
taken on, and the 13 Ponseti patients that are currently being seen, and you
get an idea of how busy the last month or so has been! I know I mostly focus on
the media/official visitors part (because that’s mostly what I see!) but
hopefully this gives you a better idea of what the rest of this amazing
hospital ship has been up to. And this doesn’t even include all the behind the
scenes stuff, like cleaning engines, building guard shacks and staircases,
fixing electrical systems, running fire drills, etc. but maybe I’ll get to that
another day.
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. ~ Genesis 2:7
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