Well, two and a half months sure did fly by since my last post! Sorry about that:/
We just finished a 7 week round of plastic surgeries last week and it was intense...but so good! This was my second time as the Plastic Surgery Team Leader and it was so nice knowing what to expect before it actually happened. I felt so much better prepared this year and it went really well.
My job started all the way back at screening day on August 28th. I sat in a small classroom at the screening site with our two plastic surgeons and hand therapist and for 10 hours we saw one potential patient after another. We had to decide if we could operate on them, would the surgery benefit them in the end (give them more mobility/better function, improve their appearance...), how long would their hospital stay be, etc. And then on September 2nd it happened - our doors to the hospital opened and the first surgeries were underway. It was exciting to see patients I had met at screening day come to the ward. I've said it before, but there's always a mix of excitement, anticipation and fear when patients first come onto the ship.
So, for the next 7 weeks we operated. By week 2, B ward was filled (20 patients), we started taking over half of A ward, and by week 3 there were plastics patients in A, B and C ward (and 1 in D because we didn't want them to feel left out;)) That's the intense part. Most specialties have 15-20 patients in the hospital at a time, they are quicker to send patients home so there's a steady turnover. Plastics patients take a long time to recover though, and need dressing changes every 2 days until healed. So, by week 3 there were 40+ patients in the hospital and it stayed that way until week 7. That's a lot of people to round on every day, write orders for, and change dressings! But, it also means more kids to play with, babies to hold and adults to share stories with. And we had an amazing team that helped get it all done every day!
In 7 weeks we did 95 surgeries and around 500 dressing changes. The average length of stay for a patient was 18 days with the longest being 56 days and counting. Congo is different from most of the West African countries we've been in. More people have jobs here and can't take months off to be in the hospital. That's been a challenge with these long term patients. They've been so patient waiting for their wounds or their children's wounds to heal, but they also have jobs and families back home and it's a big sacrifice to leave those things and stay on the ship for so long. Each patient I've met in this 7 weeks has had a story to tell. A story about how they got burned, got a contracture, heard about Mercy Ships, left home in search for hope... and I thought I'd share some of those stories with you over the next few weeks so you can see who I've spent the last few month with. So stay tuned.
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