My apologies for the delay in writing. Sadly I am now back in the states and away from the patients and members of Team Heart.
I departed Kigali on Tuesday evening, sad to be leaving, and was back to work in Boston Thursday morning.
The last few weeks have been full of emotions, eye opening experiences and encounters and a few surprises...but I guess that's to be expected when you fly with a dedicated team of 46 to do heart surgery in sub-Saharan Africa.
Rwanda is a beautiful country full of beautiful people. The land of a thousand hills. It’s very green and lush with red dirt like Hawaii. The streets are bustling with people all hours of the day and night. Rwandans are friendly and polite…a pleasant change coming from Boston.
In my time in Rwanda I visited four other Hospitals, one in the city center and three others in the country. King Faisal certainly is at a higher level as far as available resources, cleanliness and patient care. During these visits I traveled with Dr Harthorne a cardiologist from MGH and saw things on echo that I have never seen before. He felt and heard things on physical exam that he hadn’t in 50 years. It was difficult for both of us assessing these patients. The Rwandan physicians have all been wonderful and are eager to develop their skills but they don’t have the resources to do so. They don’t have the experience or equipment to treat many of their patients and look to us for help. They make a diagnosis with a physical exam and prescribe the right medication but without cardiac surgeons in Rwanda, treatment stops there. The operative list is long and many of the patients needed help months ago. In our trips to the University and Community hospitals we were essentially just confirming and documenting the severity of their disease. Walking away was difficult, knowing that the next surgical team isn’t set to arrive until November. Many of the patients will either not survive that longer be too far into the disease process that surgery will no longer be of use. The most difficult part is that the patients see us "muzungu” with an ultrasound machine or a stethoscope and they appear a bit more hopeful and seem to think that we're there to help and we're going to save them. The reality is that we're there to assess them, and pass their info on to the two doctors who have the daunting task of creating the list. There are 20 patients to be selected to undergo surgery in Sudan and less than that for the Australians and Team Heart 2010.
I would like to give thanks and Kudos to all the dedicated individuals involved in this project: Ceeya who organized this whole endeavor, the surgical, anesthesia and perfusion teams who worked tirelessly through complex cases in an environment with limited resources and daily power outages (and a backup generator that takes a few seconds to kick on). The ICU team of doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists who stayed up all night watching over and tending to the patients in their most critical hours. The step-down nurses and PA’s who also worked hard day and night caring for these patients. They were all rock stars, as Sue G would say, and there are 13 patients whose lives have been forever changed as a result of their dedication and humanity. Thanks to Sarah Fostello and Jim McCarthy from GE for providing me with the Vivid I. And a special thanks to Dr Warren Harthorne, without him I would not have had the opportunity to be involved in this wonderful project.
Chip said it …this truly is the best thing we do in our lives.
It was a true privilege to be a part of this team.
Jennifer Neary
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