Screening..

Elijah

So first of all I need to apologise for the delay with this update, has been over a week since screening and only just getting round to it now. The hospital properly opened to patients on Sunday and the first cases started on Monday so has been a very busy few days!

Screening was an amazing, if very overwhelming day; 4000 people turned up at the city's football stadium and waited from the previous evening to be seen. Out of these 1600 were seen and examined (there is an initial pre screening to filter those that we are unable to help) and then we allocated 560 operation slots for these patients. It really hit home just the massive need here and unfortunately out of those 4000 the small minority that we are able to help with the facilities we have on board.

I was based on the maxillo facial station and we were very fortunate to have 3 max fax surgeons (1 who has been here with his family for the past 25 years and the other 2 who are also very experienced with Mercy Ships but who come out for the initial few weeks every year to help). There was also a couple from the UK who have been coming out for a few weeks each year to do the pathology and biopsies for the tumours. This was an amazing aid to enable us to have more of an idea of a diagnosis when I came to review the patient.

Some of the tumours and growths we saw were just awful and at a stage you would never see at home because they would be resected before they became that large. They were very disfiguring and often would cause the patient to be ostracised from their communities or families.

The general surgical station was similar but we had a much higher frequency of patients (over 450 hernia patients and 120  thyroid goitres to be seen) so crude screening was done to allow those we thought we may be able to help to come and be assessed properly on the ship at a later stage. Currently this is all hanging in the balance anyway as they have had a lot of cancellations from the general surgeons they were expecting. So if anyone is a general surgeon or knows one please get in touch! Some of the pictures from the goitres are below. There tends to be a far higher frequency here due to lack of iodine in the diet.

Overall screening was a great day; the whole crew of the ship (about 400; non medical and medical) were involved with the security and general running. It all went very smoothly; compared to last year in Sierra Leone where there were more problems with crowd control and rioting.

Is beginning to hit home though now just how often we have to say no to patients who we could easily help with the resources we have available in the West. A lot of babies are born with encephaloceles (an outpouching of the brain and membranes due to a defect with skull fusion). We saw a lot of children with this problem and have scanned most of their heads to see if we can help. Unfortunately there is no neuro surgeon on board and no affordable neuro surgical facilities in Togo, so we have had to turn away at least 5 children this week who we know have not got a good prognosis or normal life expectancy without surgery.

One of these was a beautiful little boy called Elijah. Him and his family are refugees from the Ivory Coast and came to us at screening. We were all hoping and praying that it would be a yes with him but unfortunately this morning I had to explain to them that there was too much of his brain in the outpouching for the operation to be done here. However we are able to send the images and some details of his case to a neuro surgeon in Germany who is going to see if he can advise or maybe even come! We were able to pray with him and his Mum this morning and she had faith that was very inspiring; just peace in God's will whatever that may be! So please be praying for him and his family.