1/14/2019 Friends of Operation Walk Freedom to Move - AKA "Walkers", greetings from Pat's Plantain Corner...Read NowDR 2019 Sunday January 13 Dear Friends of Operation Walk Freedom to Move (OWFTM), Hello dear people, so good to write to you all again! The beginning of our trip has been spectacular; no flights were delayed, all of our implants made it, and we have had none of the early trouble that plagued us last year! After last years’ challenging start to our mission, those of us on our governing Board made a decision to have our volunteers only fly through southern and warm weather cities. This decision was very wise as there were some weather related travel challenges in the US this past weekend but not for our team! We all made it just fine! I have decided to call all the Friends of Operation Walk Freedom to Move, ‘Walkers’ cuz it’s way faster for me to type ‘Walkers’ than Friends of Operation Walk Freedom to Move. And since this is my blog, I get to make the rules! This is particularly exciting to me since I am a normal married guy and there is very little in life that I get to make the rules about! By the way, honey if you think this is not a good idea, just let me know and I can change it back… We have had a very busy few days getting prepped for our week of surgery. I traveled down here with one of my favoritist people in the entire world, Danielle Simmons. Danielle is my niece and has just started going to college and has dreams of becoming an orthopedic surgeon! We arrived at the ILAC Mission at about 4:30AM Friday and our clinic began at 8AM. So after a couple hours of sleep and some awesome Dominican coffee we were beginning our time here of helping all of the people that you Walkers so wonderfully support! Friday was our ILAC clinic day and we saw nearly double our normal amount of patients and practically filled our schedule! I think the word of our presence in January is spreading! Saturday was our clinic day at our hospital Juan Bosch and we we had a fully booked OR schedule by 10AM and began adding patients to our standby list! While our docs were seeing patients other things were occurring: Danielle, Shannon, Natalie and I were in the Mission warehouse beginning our task of pulling together all of the stuff we had left over from last year, searching out numerous Pat Williams hidey holes where each year I stash our most treasured items, and also locating and beginning to catalogue all of the supplies we ordered and shipped for the trip this year. This is an all-day affair, one that is dirty, sweaty, smelly, tiring, taxing, and can be quite back-breaking. Excellent news about Danielle being here to lift all the heavy boxes! Meanwhile, Peter McNamara, Peter Dowell, and Hugh Potter were over at Juan Bosch working on that Cadillac autoclave that you Walkers so generously donated money for repairs for. I am not sure of all of the Dominican swear words yet after having been here for 10 years in a row, but I did hear a few new ‘blue words’ that I had never heard before. Believe it or not, most Dominican swear words use some derivative of plantanos which is Dominican for plantains. Hmm, NEVER woulda guessed that! A whole new language of swear words many of which involve the contemptable plantain somehow? It’s sorta like someone pitched me a softball. So easy to hit out of the park! Plantains aside (for now) my autoclave update for today is this. Peter McNamara is the engineer that volunteered to come down here and repair the autoclave. The repair will save us NUMEROUS bad runs in the World War II era machines we currently use (which we have to rerun costing us hours and hours). Bad runs mean delayed surgeries, frazzled nerves, and large portions of our volunteer staff ending their day at 9PM or later, even as late as midnight on one or two occasions. So the plantanos words weren’t good news as you might imagine. One repair lead to another problem, another repair, another problem and so on. Peter is a magician and even spent time filing down the edge of some nuts to make the tools that he had access to, work. Can you imagine? Getting a file and filing metal away to make your socket wrench work? I would just try and hit it with a big hammer and if that didn’t work I’d go get a bigger hammer and keep repeating that process until I broke forever the thing I was trying to fix! (See why I don’t get to make many decisions around home?) As we sit right this very second, the autoclave is partially working. There are two circuit boards that need to function; one is, one isn’t. Peter M feels very confident that we will be using the caddy autoclave before long, please keep your fingers crossed. This would be a HUGE improvement for us, a complete game changer for so many reasons!!! I will provide an update to you when I can. For now we have electricity flowing through the autoclave and we are getting steam pressure into it. That hasn’t happened for over 8 years! Progress!!!!! So many old friends here! I am excited to see many of our team that I have not seen for 51 weeks! Life changes and our paths diverge where once they were parallel. But for this week each year the divergence takes yet another turn and here we are yet again taking care of these good people together, here in the DR! As always our docs, OR teams, and of our volunteers are set and staged to change lives of patients and their families forever! Thanks to all of you Walkers and your generosity that continues year after year we get to keep doing this! Drs. Paul Duwelius and Mike Vessely are joined this year on our Portland team by Dr. Carlos Lavernia from Miami. Dr. Lavernia is a Cuban national who has at least one Fellow who lives and practices here in the DR. We are very excited to have him this year and with our 5th room (2 being filled with our St. Louis docs, Drs. Tessier and Powell) we are shooting for our normal 50-60 joint replacements. We have some really challenging cases this year which I will fill in more for you as we go. As an aside, we saw a 15 year-old girl yesterday who has sickle cell anemia and has a horrible hip! She is WAY too young for this operation and though we want to help her we just cannot. Please pray for her to have some level of pain relief as she goes through life. We did agree to see her each year and may do her in time to come but she is looking at a decade or more of challenge before she is anywhere close to being a candidate for a total hip, but I digress. My old friends returning are: Paul Duwelius, MD Mike Vessely, MD Shannon Coupens Madeline Vessely Laia Alonso Felipe Flores Alisa Labatto Tim Kirby Annette Gorreman-Kirby Peter Dowell Andrea Weber Juan Rangel Debbie Larson Natalie Reed Carolyn Swanson Hugh Potter Connor Schwab Vafa Talebi Brent Graham, MD We have many new faces this year as well! I am personally very happy for Dr. Duwelius who has the distinct pleasure this year of having his daughter Maggie as part of our group. Each year at our Sunday night dinner we each stand up and say a couple words about ourselves. When Maggie’s turn came around she mentioned that obviously she has “lived around her dad a long time but he has never had a chance seen him in a professional setting”. So nice that she is going to be able to see dad changing lives here, making a difference. On the other hand, several of our group joked that though we have WORKED with Dr. Duwelius a long time we haven’t ever seen him acting professionally either! Just kidding Pablo, we love you dude! We have other new faces as well: Josh Valdez, ST Maggie Duwelius Donnie McMahon Sharon Carver, RN Carlos Lavernia, MD Danielle Simmons Maria Kirby Elaine Broad, MD Today was spent at the hospital in preparation of our big day tomorrow. We have 4 hips and 11 knees on the schedule! It is a great way to start. I feel very confident this year. Thanks to the effort of a ton of folks I feel like our OR is more prepared than ever, more organized than ever, and we are set to do more good than ever. And speaking of great ways to start, we all got to see Ramona again yesterday as well. She hasn’t changed at all, she is so nice, so motherly to all of us! She is still here cooking and smiling, and doing her best to take care of us while we are here! I have a new secret weapon when it comes to me not eating the gelatinous tasteless goo that some call mangoo (mashed plantain with olive oil) and some call wallpaper paste (mashed plantain with olive oil). The new secret weapon is Danielle. My day one plan was to use Danielle on Ramona showing her what a brilliant and lovable person Danielle is. Worked like a charm! Ramona decided to take Danielle under her wing and ‘put some meat on her’ while she is here in the DR. Ramona took my cold, soaked with condensation, nasty, soggy, unnaturally heavy, stinky, just above room temperature, Styrofoam container of goo and give it Danielle. I got a delicious piece of char-grilled sea bass in a truffle saffron chimet sauce for lunch, Danielle got wallpaper paste! This is gonna be great! Thank you, Pat Williams |
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