It is 21:03 local time and I just left the OR after almost 12 hours of surgery. Why am I telling you this? Because I got to witness a miracle today.
The lady that had us on our toes the whole day is a 25-year young, only 35 kg light, beautiful woman with a gruesome tumor in the middle of her face. The tumor covered almost all of her mouthspace, jaw, reached up to her ear and her eye and distorted her whole appearance while also constantly threatening to kill her by either suffocating or starving her (because she wasn’t able to breathe, eat or drink properly, since the tumor invaded so much mouthspace) or causing massive blood loss. I still can’t show you pictures (and most of you will be thankful that I’m not showing you pictures of this lady) and I don’t want to go into any more details.
So this tumor already challenged us last week, when it started to bleed in the evening, so we had to perform an emergency surgical tracheostomy in local anesthesia so she wouldn’t suffocate. Today she was on schedule for the removal of her tumor and all I can say is that at the end of the day she had lost twice of her own blood volume. We had some hot phases of acute bleeding during the surgery where I thought she wouldn’t make it. But thanks to Dr. Gary’s amazing Maxillofacial surgical skills combined with help from a german MaxFax surgeon, his amazing OR team, the ward and ICU team (and anesthesia) the patient survived – and she looks nothing like before.
A very special shoutout at this point goes to all the crew members that donated their precious blood today (because that’s where we get it on the ship – the crew members are our blood bank and we couldn’t do surgeries like these without them) and I also really want to give a big thank you to our senior lab technician, who did an amazing job today in constantly bringing in fresh blood, relentlessly doing all our lab works and also restocking all our quick-lab equipment-and always with a smile on her face! You are amazing!
 So, we just brought our patient to ICU safely, she will stay asleep tonight and tomorrow is a new day and her new life has just begun. If I get the opportunity and permission, I will get you some before/after pictures, so stay tuned!
Good night and Godspeed!
Love from the Africa Mercy!
Silke
