Surgeries

Today's dispatch is a little late. Melanie Wood and I have returned to the states, and now we're telling the stories we didn't have time to tell from Quito, because we were just too busy. This is the story about the surgeries performed in cooperation with Hands For Humanity, "a nonprofit charitable foundation reaching out to meet the needs of underserved children and families primarily from Ecuador." (See their home page at http://handsforhumanity.com/wordpress/.)

As a retired Air Force physician's assistant, this is Melanie's second visit to Ecuador to offer her skills. She not only helped, she photo-documented the gift of a visiting orthopedic surgeon and anesthesiologist to help children in Ecuador.

That's Melanie, below, with a girl about 11 years old, who underwent a second surgery to fix her club foot.

Melanie Wood of Portland, OR, a retired Air Force physician's assistant, and my side-kick on the Ecuador trip, with a child who underwent a second operation to fix a club foot.

Hands for Humanity provided the clean, sterile operating room, shown below, where local and visiting doctors perform surgeries. Kate Whelp, a Minnesota resident and founder of Hands for Humanity, raised funds for the facility.

The three x-rays below show the kind of issues the surgeons dealt with.

 Immediately below, an x-ray shows the displacement of a young boy's hand. The radius (the arm bone on the thumb side of the hand) sustained a break that became infected, and the bone's growth plate died. As the ulna (bone on the pinkie finger side) continued to grow, the hand was tipped to the side.

In the next image, the opaque object on the right shows pins in the thigh bone (femur) of a young patient. The pins were placed to correct dysplasia, a condition that can occur as the infant passes through the birth canal, resulting in dislocation of the joint. Doctors routinely look for this condition at birth in the United States, and it is easily corrected. However, in third world countries the condition can go undetected. If it is not fixed,children cannot walk well.

The x-ray below shows screws placed in a hip socket to correct for dysplasia.

In the photo below, a youngster scheduled for surgery demonstrates how he cannot bend his left arm. There was a fracture within the elbow joint that happened after birth. Doctors performed a long surgery that will allow him to bend the left arm up to 90 degrees. He was recovering when Melanie left Portoviejo for Quito, where she joined me for Spanish language classes at Simon Bolivar, a language school.

Not all defects require surgery; The infant's foot shown below had some toes fused together, a condition that is not uncommon. Web toes are easy to fix, but the surgeons decided to wait until the child is older. The child does not need the surgery at this time and it may prove to not be essential, Melanie explained.

Teenagers were allowed into the operating room, where anasthesiologist Matt Ulrich explained about blood gases. Among the teenagers was Ecuador-born Maya, the adopted daughter of Hands for Humanity founder Kate Whelp, and two other teenagers--the son of the orthopedic surgeon and his friend from the states.

Graduates from medical school in Ecuador are expected to work as general practitioners for a year before their residency. Below, the newly-minted doctor on the left wants to become an orthopedic surgeon, and he assisted the American doctor, Tony Stans, during the operation to repair the displaced wrist, displayed in the x-ray above.

This close-up below shows just how badly the wrist was displaced. The ulna has reached beyond the radius to form a virtual "shelf" beside the hand.

Matt Ulrich, anesthesiologist, smiles after surgery with the guardian of a child from the Casa Hogar de Belen orphanage, who underwent an operation to repair a club foot. Not all orphans are without parents. Some children are given up by their families. In this case, the child was removed from her home by social services because her parents were allowing her to starve.

The little girl below was described as a "lazy breather."  Ten minutes out of surgery, she was crying very slowly. Then her crying became more and more  slow and her oxygen saturation numbers fell. Matt put an oxygen mask over her face to create positive pressure that pushed oxygen into her lungs to restore normal breathing. In this photo he's checking her out after that crisis was over.

During a break in the procedures, an American nurse takes a salsa lesson from a local.

There's so much more to be shared about what these volunteers were doing for the Ecuadorean children, but you get the picture.

Love,
Robert, Melanie
And Wilson