The Harvest Is Plentiful and the Laborers Few
There is of course no end to pathology and that often is of a nature unique to the continent.
By Stephen Murray, MD Vascular Surgery Providence Inland Vascular Institute Occasionally in one’s life, the course set before you is very clear. I have always told my kids that what I lacked in the gift of horsepower I was compensated for with tenacity. With a certain goal in mind, the means to that end were speed bumps. In 1975 when I first visited a mission hospital in Africa as a freshman in college and saw Stephen Murray, MD with “sterile flyswatter” my first surgery at “0 dark thirty” I was hooked. Since then I have been to Belize, Mexico, India and many times to the Dominican Republic, but was pleased to be able to return again for the third time to Africa last February. There I served for two weeks as an attending surgeon to five of the most wonderful residents you could ever hope for. At Mbingo Baptist Hospital, Cameroon there is a residency program for surgeons under the auspices of the Pan-African Association of Christian Surgeons (PAACS). PAACS has several other participating hospitals on the continent and I served six years earlier at another (Banso Baptist Hospital) in Cameroon which has direct ties to Washington and Spokane in particular (more on that later). The residency programs are intended to train doctors to be surgeons after the western model with the intention of training only those that will make a commitment to stay in Africa upon completion of their training and thus far it has been a success in doing so. Towards that end, the training (other than the lack of an 80-hour work week...) is quite similar to any American surgery program (well, there is the weekly Bible Study, too!). The major differences come with the dire lack of imaging technology other than a laptop ultrasound, but they can make that tool sing opera! As a result there are many “African CT scans” done (exploratory laparotomies) with findings Sleeping surgery resident in O.R. generally unexpected to the average gringo surgeon.
The express purpose of both of my trips to Cameroon has been to relieve the local surgeon as they Rounding on surgery ward accompany some or all of their residents to an intense two week didactic training course in Kenya. This time around I was accompanied by another American surgeon (he is actually from western Washington). We were stretched to do things that neither of us does (or in some cases have ever done) here. Fortunately, my Army experience allows my muscle memory to kick into General Surgeon mode when I participate in those trips. That said, at least during this last trip, there were qualified orthopaedic, ob-gyn and ENT surgeons in place. That wasn’t the case six years ago when a former resident of mine from San Antonio and I were the only two surgeons in a 250-bed hospital. That trip had some very weird local connections. The duplex we lived in was shared on the other side of the wall by an ARNP from Colfax, Washington. On the Stephen Murray, MD; Mark Snell, MD coffee table were six-month and PAACS Residents old copies of Christianity Today with an address label to Norm James, MD, a plastic surgeon from Spokane, who had been there just before us. Weirdest of all though was the fact that the side of the duplex that we were staying in was once the home of Helen Marie Schmidt, MD. Helen was the first woman to finish the Virginia-Mason Surgery residency in 1968. From there she went straight to Cameroon for over three decades and now resides in Spokane! Upon my return, we had a nice meal at our home with Helen Marie, Norm James and his wife, Terry. I told you it was weird… To the task at hand...Human suffering, physical and spiritual, knows no racial or geographic bounds. There is estimated to be one surgeon for every million people in Africa so the mission is daunting. Nevertheless, the future is bright for every person that these soon-to-be surgeons will care for. I consider it an honor to be allowed to care for the whole person there alongside those intrepid future full-fledged surgeons. Anyone, of any specialty, interested in contributing to this effort can contact me or the Christian Medical and Dental Association website (http://www. cmda.org/wcm) where they can put you in contact with PAACS.
April SCMS The Message 2