Surgery Day

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Tamale, Ghana- UFS Volunteer House

Wednesdays are surgery day. Around 9:00 AM, we headed over to the eye clinic for what we had all been preparing for ever since the start of the trip: Tons and tons… of surgeries done by the famed Dr. Seth Wanye. Half of the volunteer corps went first to observe while the rest of us filled in some more ID cards on the computers. Finally, after about 3 hours of typing in “Abdulai”’s and “Mohammed”s, the first team came back, very smiley from what they saw.
Putting on a used pair of scrubs, a hankerchief-like bandana, but still keeping on the shoes I wore, we entered the very nicely air-conditioned “operating theater”. As most of the cases we saw were cataract cases, I’ll explain some of the details regarding those surgeries first. A cataract, usually developed due to old age or else is congenital, causes the lens to cloud up to a pearly white, thus giving the patient the effect of going essentially blind. To fix this condition, the lens must be taken out of the eye via various techniques depending on the available technology, and replaced with an artificial lens that will usually last them for the rest of their lives. Here in Tamale, Dr. Wanye uses Small Incision Cataract Surgery. Phacoemulsification (where the dysfunctional lens is broken up by waves of ultrasound and then sucked up) is the preferred method in the states, but Dr. Wanye does not yet have all the parts necessary for a functional Phaco machine. SICS involves making quite a large cut across the top of the eye, where Dr. Wanye then manipulates the lens a bit to allow it to essentially come out from that incision and inserts the new lens through that same cut. Probably the most interesting thing was that they would use a hot point (made through a flame) to stop the blood from flowing out of the eye due to the various cuts that the Doctor had to make to allow him to operate without a bunch of blood flowing everywhere. One particularly scary surgery involved a girl probably in her teens who had bilateral congenital cataracts. Essentially, she had been blind for years, thus greatly impairing her ability to go to school and do regular teenager tasks. When the surgery started as Dr. Wanye make the small incision on her cornea, she began to breathe very quickly. At a couple points during the surgery, she actually moved her head!!! Everyone screamed in shock and yelled to tell her to remain still… for obviously the sake of her eye. Of course, she was just scared… so Katie offered to hold her hand… which helped quite a bit. But it makes me wonder as to why the staff wouldn’t have restraining materials to hold the bodies in place. All in all, the end result was two successful SICS cataract surgeries: from being totally blind to fully seeing everything. I’m sure it was a great blessing to her.

Other surgeries that have been done are to get rid of pterygiums and corneal repair. Ptyerygiums are when eye membranes invade the cornea, which interferes greatly with vision. So the Doctor essentially just cuts the invading tissue with a scissors. Corneal repair involves suturing with a thread is extremely TINY. I don’t know how they are able to handle such small thread like that.

Back at home around 5:00 PM, we had banku and fufu for dinner. Both banku and fufu involve a sort of rich dough dipped into a sauce. Banku is made with corn, while fufu is made with yams. David made a good point in questioning why Ghanaians are so insistent on distinguishing the two since the doughs look almost exactly the same and they taste relatively similar too. I’m still decided whether I like them or not…

I joined the 30-day shred workout halfway through after debating whether I wanted to kill myself physically again, but it ended up being ok in the end. Instead of sweating for three hours after the workout was over, it was only about an hour. We ended the night playing some Poker and Egyptian Rat Screw.