"Before and After"

Well, several of you will recall a blog entry from several weeks ago when we told you about Tomas, as man we met at clinic in Aselsi who had complaints listed on his chart of, "headaches, leg pain, and tumor on his back". Here's a reminder picture of that THIRD little complaint of his! And yes, you're reading the "Hmmm... wouldn't it be great to actually know what this thing is?!" expression on Heidi's face correctly!


One of the most amazing blessings we have received during our time down here is our ability to communicate and work together with several other medical missionaries in the area. Tom Hoak is a general surgeon who moved down here almost a year ago from California with his wife Jana and two teenage girls. They have been doing amazing work at the Hospital Buen Samaritano in Chichicastenango, and we were very thankful to be able to refer this patient to Dr. Hoak for evaluation. He saw him Monday in his office and admitted him for surgery on Tuesday.

So the first picture is our friend under anesthesia waiting for his surgery to start. The next one is during the surgery, which Dr. Hoak was kind enough to let Heidi assist with. It's really great to get such good follow-up on patients sent for referral!

The last picture is the promised "after" picture, which shows this man's much more normal-looking lower back post-operatively. Can you imagine being able to sit back in a chair or lie on your back for the first time in 20 or 30 years? It's very exciting to be able to get this done for him. We'd also like to mention here that Dr. Hoak and his wife have taken on the project of starting a Benevolence Fund at the Hospital Buen Samaritano in order to help patients like this pay for the surgeries that they need. The Hospital there is a private, mission-based, Methodist Hospital built with donations from the States. Dr. Hoak offers his services for free, but the nurses, pharmacists, scrub techs, administration, ETC... are generally not missionaries and must be paid in order to keep the hospital running. This means that without the Hoak's fund, patients like this would have to continue waiting for the government hospitals here to maybe someday finally start doing "elective" surgeries such as this again. If anyone's interested in more information about his fund or how you can help, we will-- of course!-- be happy to pass that along to you!
We are sending the tumor off for a pathologist's diagnosis, and expect results in about 2 weeks, by the way. There is no reason to believe that it is cancerous, but we are sending it to be 100% sure and to satisfy the curiosity of many-- as well as prepare ourselves in the rare event that we run in to another one of these in the future!

Our apologies to the Maine Eye Team and their families for monopolizing our blog space with our own story today. We'll try to post some more pictures from the team either tonight or tomorrow...