Patient screening

I had this past Friday off, so I signed myself up as a volunteer for a screening. Patient screenings take place off ship: usually Mercy Ships conducts one large screening at the beginning of the outreach, but because the Togolese elections were taking place when the ship arrived to the country (possibility of unrest/protests), they decided to have smaller screenings, a couple weeks spread apart. This was the last general screening that Mercy Ships was doing in Togo, so they expected almost two thousand people like they’d experienced at other locations: very luckily—as we thought we wouldn’t have enough staff—we only had about seven or eight hundred who showed up.

Screening was such an indescribable experience, but I’ll try my best to paint a small picture of what happened on our screening day. We drove about an hour an a half north of Lome to Assahoun, where the screening would be held (woke up at 5 AM! And boy is the African weather lovely in the morning). We had maybe 15-20 people with us, nurses and other crew members (like me) who were volunteering on their spare time to work in different capacities. The patients would line up to see the nurses who would check if they qualified for the very specific type of surgeries that Mercy Ships can do. Because this was the last screening, surgery spots were mostly filled and we were only looking for extreme cases of plastics/burns, max fax (cleft lip/palates), and VVF. My job for the day was to escort patients from the line to one of the 3 nurses, and then either to the data team, one of the prayer teams, or to the gate.

I stood right next to the nurses’ station so I heard the conversations between the nurses and the patients that came to see them: it was heartbreaking to hear some of their stories, and to see their physical pain. You see the unfairness of it all-- things that would get treated immediately in the US get left untended in Africa, to devastating effects. People show up with goiters the size of small watermelons, tumors growing on their eyes and all over their faces, children and adults with extreme bowed legs. Culturally, those who aren’t “normal” are shunned from their communities, as they’re assumed to have done something wrong. Sometimes they come and there’s just nothing we can do for them: surgery spots are full, surgeons aren’t on the ship, and sometimes the illness is inoperable and will be fatal in due time. I've gained such a whole new level of respect for screening nurses, because I can’t imagine having to tell most of the people who come to see us that we can’t help them. If not chosen for surgery, we take them to the prayer teams and we pray for them: we pray for comfort, we pray for another way someday. We pray because that’s all we can do.

But in the midst of the sadness there are those incredibly happy moments when a patient gets chosen for surgery. Since I knew we were looking for max fax, I was so happy every time I saw a patient with a cleft lip, because I knew that we had the capability to fix it. If screened, the data team takes down their information and gives them a Mercy Ships card so they can come back to the ship for their appointment. At the appointment, the surgeon needs to make sure that the patient is operable, so just getting a card at the screening, which is a huge feat in itself, isn’t a guarantee of surgery.

The whole experience is just so humbling. It just makes you realize how little power you have in the face of everything, and how everything is really in God’s hands. And on a more minor note, it was good for me to get off the ship and get reminded of why I came all the way to Africa to chop vegetables. Puts things in much needed perspective.

EDIT, 05/07/10>>

We're not allowed to take our cameras to screenings, but here are some official Mercy Ships pictures taken by our photographer, Deb Bell (thanks!).