Feb 27 – March 3

Wednesday through Friday were surgical days.  We had breakfast and devotions daily at 6 am at the compound where we were staying, and left for the hospital by 7 am.  Some days the streets were more crowded than others; lots of small golf cart sized cabs, motorcycles, pedestrians and of course cows and water buffalo.  One day a dog was sanding in the entrance to the hospital, blocking our way.

We used two operating rooms with two OR tables in each room.  We had to rig up the oxygen and suction in one room as it was not normally an OR.  We brought portable anesthesia machines with us, as well as most of our equipment, monitors and supplies. They do use the building for surgical cases even when we are not there, but it was hard to tell exactly what kinds of surgery and how much they did.  It wasn’t as distracting as I thought it would be to have two patients in the OR at the same time.  Each patient had his or her own team of surgeon, OR nurse, scrub person and anesthesia provider.   Occasionally it was a little noisy, but often it was helpful to have the extra people.

Our anesthesia team was awesome!  We had four anesthesiologists, one nurse anesthetist, one anesthesia assistant and a respiratory therapist who was our technician/assistant/logistics and supply person.  It was wonderful to have enough people to make sure that we never had to start or end a case alone and to have help on difficult cases.  It also allowed us to have breaks since we worked late every day. I did about 25 cases myself.

Every day the staff of CICM brought us lunch and dinner.  It was often rice, veggies and some kind of meat in a sauce, but we also had some Chinese food and other things. The food was abundant and good!

We needed to finish early on Friday so we could pack up our supplies in order to get them to the train, so we worked late on Thursday in order to get as much done as possible before Friday. We ended up doing over 100 cases.  Most were plastic surgery – cleft lip and palate, scar revisions, burn scar/contracture release.  We also did some general surgery cases including three cases where the child had an abnormal GI tract and needed specialized surgical care. 

The dental/feeing team spent the week seeing multiple patients as well.  They saw babies that were too young or malnourished to have surgery.  For them, they gave the mothers specialized nipples to improve the baby’s ability to eat and also gave them nutrition information and supplements.  They also worked with older patients who need orthodontic work because their palates had been so deformed that the teeth and upper jaw was not properly developed.

Thursday night many of the women had our hands and feet painted with Henna by some of the girls at CICM.  It was fun!  Henna painting is usually done for weddings, special occasions and for fun.  The Children’s Home has over 100 children who live there and attend school.  Most of them are orphans.  They really seemed to be happy and well cared for.  The staff couldn’t have been nicer to us and took care of everything we needed.

Friday we finished our cases by 11 am and packed up all of our supplies and equipment so it could get loaded on a truck to get taken to the train.  We were all taking the train later, but it takes a long time to load 60 or more trunks and personal suitcases, so it had to be done in advance.  Friday after we were done, we went back to the mission compound for lunch, had a tour of the grounds including of the nursing school and met with the founder and also his son-in-law who runs a community development program.  We got on the train about 7 pm and took it through the night arriving in Agra early in the morning before dawn.  The train was a sleeper car so most of us were able to get some sleep.  It wasn’t quite like Amtrak, but it was quite adequate.  We went to hotel where we had time to shower and change, and had breakfast.  We went to the Taj Mahal and had a wonderful tour.  It was a gorgeous warm, sunny day and we enjoyed being outside.  The Taj Mahal is quite impressive and well worth the visit.  We had lunch at a Pizza Hut which many people said satisfied their craving for American food!  We also visited a marble factory where we saw workers making marble inlaid pieces in the same fashion as the Taj Mahal.  We boarded our bus to Delhi which took several hours.

The countryside between Agra and Delhi was lush green and fairly empty along the new four lane highway we drove along.  We passed dozens of brick making places which were just piles of dirt being made into bricks, baked and then laid out to dry.

After we reached Delhi, we went shopping at a local market and then had dinner at a local restaurant.  We got to the airport at 11:30 pm.  It took awhile for the LEAP trunks to get all checked in, but we still had several hours to wait for our flight.  We were all exhausted and it was tough to stay awake waiting to board.  Our flights were uneventful, and we did get some sleep.  We had a few hours layover in London and then made it home without any problems.

Although in some ways India seems very far away right now, we keep having images and remembrances pop into our mind.  Jet lag has a way of making your slow down and think about what last week was like.