Surgical Week

This past week I (Kemmel) was in Montellano at Clinica Ezell working in the sterilization room. The surgical team was very diverse with people from multiple locations in the US (Missouri, Texas, Tennessee, California, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Maryland, Wyoming, Montana and Colorado) and various backgrounds. This week was focused on general and GYN surgery, a total of 68 procedures and around 63 patients, some with double procedures. The cases ranges from minor skin surgery to hernia repairs to gall bladder removal to hysterectomies. All of the surgeries were successful with one gall bladder case being rather complicated due to some abnormal anatomy of the patient. I was not told of any crazy post-op infections, so we must of done a good job sterilizing the instruments. :) We did 7 Lap Choles this week which is the most we have done all year, so thank God we had some experienced surgical techs/nurses and surgeons to allow these procedures to be performed.

We continue to see patients in the advance stages of cervical cancer and this week during a pap smear clinic we had 3 out of 12 ladies testing positive for cervical cancer. This encouraged some of the physicians to help us with the possibility of donating a colposcope in attempts to start a larger effort of providing a better way of screening for cervical cancer.


We also had 3 missionaries from Guatemala join us for the week to assist with translation, sterilization, nursing and whatever came up. These two ladies were an excellent addition to the group, helping demonstrate the love of Christ to our patients.


In these surgical teams many times we are short on recovery room nursing staff, so if you are reading this and you are a nurse, please check out http://www.healthtalents.org/ to see about coming and serving with us for a week. We could use your help!

The surgical week ended on Friday morning and I was able to get back to Guatemala City to get our visas renewed with no problems this time. I tried to do this a week or so ago and I was not able to finish the process as the credit card I had did not have Lisa's name on it (which has never been a problem before).

Also this week Lisa made a trip to Antigua to meet with her fellow students and her professor from the University. She had her first test in this process and passed! She did not get the best grade of the class, nor did she get the worst, but for Spanish being her second language she did great and was only a few points short of another cuban physician going through the same process and Spanish is her primary language. Please continue to keep Lisa in your prayers as the language barrier can be difficult when working with people in a professional environment.

Since Lisa was in Antigua and the group went to Antigua on Friday, we were able to hook up and spend Friday and Saturday together. Saturday afternoon we picked up a group from Sheri's church in North Carolina - Southfork Church of Christ. They will be helping us with some clinics this following week. Today we will get some rest this morning, and then this afternoon, join the group for lunch and an afternoon worship service in Santa Cruz del Quiche.