The HCMC team is having a great time! Rod and Connie Lusk went to the Pediatric Hospital #1 and I won’t see them until tomorrow. The rest of us went to the ENT Hospital, which is clearly the most surgically advanced ENT facility in Vietnam. We see surgery performed at a higher level here. Yet, the hunger to learn is just as great.
The ear team did surgery by morning and prepared the dissection lab in the afternoon as the course starts in the morning. 75 attended in Hanoi and more than 80 will be at this course. John McElveen leaves tonight, so he took the afternoon off to visit the Cu Chi tunnels. These are very special to me because I lived at Cu Chi, above ground, 40 years ago and we were oblivious of the tunnel complex below us. Returning there in 1996 was part of the cleansing of my soul.
Despite the focus on ears, my schedule was packed seeing very difficult and challenging cases. We did fun surgery today, presenting new ideas, and tomorrow we will do a very challenging pediatric airway with near total obstruction at three levels. Oh! To do this at home!!!!
We had an unhappy case presentation where a young woman presented with a benign head and neck tumor and her doctors aborted what was her first pregnancy so she could undergo treatment. We challenged the decision (too late obviously) and said that ethical discussions like this should always be discussed in the department. We suggested that the young woman probably will have life long depression, a life was taken, and all for a benign tumor that could wait treatment until after delivery. Well, she does have depression and she still has the tumor. We suggested that when a tumor is not life threatening, all the facts have to be examined carefully and priorities ethically established. I believe the entire discussion was well received. We were able to bring it up again later, to a second group. Our hope is that by discussing this, such an outcome will never happen again.
The non-medicals came with us for part of the morning and then they disappeared and I’ve not seen them. That should be good news! I think an educational opportunity opened that was quite exciting, but I will learn more, later.
Ric Leinbach and Brian Nichols had their best days, I believe, and the rest of the week promises to be equally exciting for them. Ric is going to do a difficult oral tumor that he has never seen and the VNese do about 10 of these each year. Role reversal and Ric is excited to learn! I them took them to my favorite shopping market and we bought wonderful knock off golf shirts for $3.50 each!!!! They had a blast. We then violated all our rules and had Vietnamese Frappacino equivalents! Mmmmmm!
Kent Dyer, neuro-otology from Oklahoma City, is my room mate and it is allowing me to keep up with ear team. Tonight we go to our only banquet (I hope) this week. It should be fun as this is a group we really know well.
It is so wonderful seeing our “children.” We’ve helped train so many of the doctors we are working with, and they’ve stayed in our homes and been part of our lives. The new members of the team are learning how deep and important these friendships are.
Thank you for your prayers. They are being answered in so many wonderful ways!
In His Service, David
