Hi and greetings from the Africa Mercy! I hope you are all doing well! Sorry that I haven’t been able to get to you sooner, the last weeks were very busy (which is great, because that means we have been able to help a lot of people)!

Today let me tell you a little about the (pediatric) orthopedic surgeries we perform onboard. I have had the privilege to serve in the OR together with Dr. Frank Haydon and his beautiful wife Kathleen (they just might be the greatest team I have met so far and an amazing example of how to work AND do life together – which is very inspiring).

There are a lot of kids here with malformations of their legs who have a hard time walking (let alone run and play as other kids do) who basically get whole new mobility after surgery.

And since the surgery can be quite painful, we (as anesthesia) do nerve blocks on our patients. This means that the kids come to the OR, fall asleep with an inhalant anesthetic, get an i.v. drip while being monitored, airway and breathing secured and then a local anesthetic is injected near a nerve that supplies certain areas of the leg for example.
This way the kids are often totally pain free after surgery or the pain is lighter and can be treated more easily with pain killers. I especially love working with Dr. Brian Barki, our anesthesia supervisor, who has taught me a lot about nerve blocks and this type of pediatric anesthesia.

After the surgery is done, the kids are put into casts, which stay on for a couple of weeks or even months. During this time of healing, the kids get physiotherapy and learn how to use their new mobility.

One of the special parts in working in the pediatric Ortho OR is that all the kids are super playful and happy. It is always so much fun to play with them before letting them fall asleep and even afterwards they are little sunshines and full of joy. It has happened more than once that I saw one of my little patients in PACU (post anesthetic care unit) or in the hallway on their way back to the wards and they laughed and waved and gave me a “donah” (malagasy word for fist bump) or a “high-five”. And when you visit the wards you will always run into little kids with huge casts on their legs and mini-walkers chasing each other up and down the hallways.

So my days in Ortho are always full and filled with joy!

Hope to hear from you!

Much love and godspeed!

Silke