Every morning starts with the pediatricians examining the patients from the previous day and hopefully being able to discharge them to go home. It is amazing how much improved the kids are less than a day later.
During the discharge process, you can tell just how much the kids are loved. You can certainly see this in the face Dr. Len Leonard Friedland, the head pediatrician.
We plan for a smooth surgical schedule every day but things do not always go as planned. Sometimes surgeries have to be cancelled. When these things happen Kim Capps, the head nurse, makes schedule adjustments on the fly to minimize the loss of OR time. Sometimes she actually finds a bit of time to help with surgery.
In some cases dental work is required as part of the procedure, which is why Rosie Mayro is an important member of the mission team. She determines what dental work is required in consultation with the doctors. She has to coordinate the dental work within the other surgery schedules and make sure the dental information is being included by Shishir Doctor who maintains all the medical records. The required dental work is performed by local Venezuelan dentists under Rosie’s guidance. Doing it this way helps insure there will be dental follow up after the team leaves. Rosie is very happy with the dentists that are associated with a new clinic near the hospital.
Today was a different day for the team. There were a wide variety of types of surgeries. We had planned for 15 but were only able to do 10.
Two of the surgeries involved reconstruction of ears. One was a new new ear and one was of an revision of an ear created last year. These take hours to do with the new ear involving removal rib cartilage from which the new ear structure is created. Happily both were successful today and overshadowed the earlier issues in the day.