2 great days to update you all on! Sorry I didn't update sooner - it has been busy as you can imagine! Busy in a good way. Monday was a wonderful first official day - everyone was extremely pleased. The permanent staff here in the hospital is so helpful with everything so it makes the first mission flow extremely smoothly. Apparently this hospital has missions EVERY week! This definitely helps them with organization. Everyone just keeps raving about all of the help they get which is so great for a first mission!
I interviewed 7 families yesterday which went extremely well! We do 6 cases a day so I got to interview all of the families that had surgery done on Monday which is a nice distraction for the parents whose children were in surgery.
All of the families are extremely open to sharing information and are very grateful for what we do. Generally what I found through all of the interviews from Monday was that all of the children live with both their mothers and fathers which is contrary to what I have heard about Ecuador. Dr. Quatela was telling me that it was relatively uncommon for the parents to be the ones to bring in the children for their surgery in Ecuador.
The people that are bringing the children in for surgery in Ecuador are usually the adoptive parents or people who simply found the children abandoned. I also believe that microtia is not as common in Guatemala as it is in Ecuador. Most of the parents do not have jobs - most work in the campo which is just working on a field; it is most common for the fathers to have jobs and the mothers to stay home with the children. The parents also give me a lot of information on how these deformities have affected their children's lives and how they anticipate it will change their lives by having this transforming surgery. The parents have gotten emotional at times which is sad, but it also makes me happy that they are so touched that their kids are being helped by this wonderful team. Usually the mothers get tears in their eyes when I ask them the question "Is there anything you'd like to say to the doctors that are helping your child?" I am so incredibly fortunate to have these relationships with these patients and their families by simply speaking their language with them and asking them simple questions about the deformity. So the families have been very generous with the information they are giving to me.
I ask all of the parents if it is okay for me to use the information for a report on this mission and they all say it is fine and one of the mother's responses struck me as something really special. She said that she was willing to give any information that would help the foundation because people need to know about this deformity and how important it is for kids to be given the opportunity to have a normal life and have this deformity fixed if possible. It is wonderful how receptive these parents have been - it has made my job much easier!
I got to interview the parents mostly, but later in the day and on Tuesday I got to see more of the kids with their parents and was able to put a name with a face which was really awesome. It is also a really neat thing to be able to establish a relationship with these parents. When I see them now, they will approach me to talk and ask questions. They feel more comfortable sharing information with me after having some conversations with them. They really let their guard down around me which means a lot. I believe tomorrow I am going to do follow up interviews so that I can see how the parents and their children are doing after their surgeries and hopefully I can talk to some of the kids more as well! The kids have been such great sports throughout this whole process; you can see in the pictures throughout this post that they are attempting to give me some smiles through their recovery! I am sure they are just happy to be done with their surgery. Hopefully I will find out more information from them tomorrow in the interviews!I will write more soon about Tuesday - probably on Thursday when I hopefully have some downtime on the trip home! I have so much to write about - Tuesday was probably the most exciting day for me! A little preview...Dr. Quatela let me scrub in with him!! Details of course will come, but I had a wonderful experience helping out in the O.R. viewing this incredibly amazing surgery! Write soon.
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