30 Days of Africa - #14

Working on ship in the operating room today instead of the dental clinic... or at least observing surgeries there :) Crew members can request to watch a surgery during their service with Mercy Ships and this morning was my assigned observation time slot. So I dressed for surgery in hospital scrubs, surgical cap, and covers for my shoes, then went into the operating theatre area on hospital deck 3 for the first time ever. My first surgery to observe was a bilateral cleft lip repair done by Dr. Gary Parker on a 7 month old baby boy. Being in the dental field, I've always been interested in cleft lip/palate surgeries and Dr. Parker was amazing to watch performing the surgery. The baby also had a cleft palate and will need surgery again when he is older to repair the palate along with rhinoplasty for his nose after the cleft surgeries are complete. After the baby's surgery was finished, I went into another operating room where the removal of a mass on the neck was in progress. This patient was a teenage boy with several lumps between the size of a golf ball and tennis ball on the right side of his neck, and the surgeons were removing them to determine whether the masses were lymphomas or not. The surgery took me back to anatomy and physiology classes in hygiene school as the surgeon pointed out the internal jugular vein and different layers of tissue surrounding the clump of growths. This surgery was also fascinating but sad at the same time, because if the lab results return positive for cancer there is no chemo therapy treatment available in Congo. So please pray for the boy to be healed through the surgery and have his results show the tumors to be benign. Thanks!