Patiently waiting
Two teams of medical volunteers
By Helen Altonn
from the Aloha Medical Mission
treat more than 4,000
in the Philippines
Star-BulletinA typhoon with heavy rain, flooding and power outages failed to keep a recent Aloha Medical Mission from seeing more than 4,000 patients and doing 500 surgical procedures on the island of Palawan in the Philippines.
Among those benefiting from the volunteer service was a 7-year-old girl with a tumor nearly as big as a football protruding from her backside, said Dr. Carl Lum, who was among the volunteer surgeons.
"It was shaped like a sausage, and kids in school called her 'Jellybean,'" he said. "We removed it. So it was one happy kid."
The team took another child, about 2 years old, to see local specialists in Manila for treatment of a congenital heart problem. "He was really blue and skinny," said Dr. Ramon Sy, AMM president. "I hope the child is OK."
A group of 48 Hawaii and mainland physicians, surgeons, nurses and lay volunteers participated in the Palawan mission from Nov. 26 to Dec. 6.
A second team of 18 mission volunteers based in New Jersey treated patients during the same period in South Colabato on the island of Mindanao.The volunteers took more than 5 tons of hospital supplies and medicine worth more than $300,000 to the two areas.
The Palawan group had trouble from the start, said Sy, who returned Monday from the Philippines. "It was an exhaustive mission."
After staying overnight in Manila, he said, 53 people, including five unofficial mission participants, boarded a plane for an early-morning flight to the province. They sat in the plane for an hour waiting for heavy rains on the island to diminish, and then the flight was canceled, he said. "We had to get off the plane with supplies and everybody. It was a big task."
The airline let their supplies remain on the plane as cargo, he said, "but we had to take 65 pieces of luggage out." Luckily, they were able to get rooms again in the hotel, he said, "but we could hardly sleep. The weather report said the weather was going to be worse, so the mission was kind of in jeopardy."
With help from Palawan's mayor, however, they were able to fly to the province the next morning although it was still raining and the area was flooded, he said.Arriving one day late and deluged with patients, he said, "We had to double up. All the surgeons had to work late." They started at about 6 a.m. and continued until 10 p.m. except for two days when the electricity went out, he said. Then they had to quit at about 8 p.m.
It rained for four of the group's six days there, Sy said. "When it rains it pours. It never stopped. And the poor patients -- we had to keep them from being wet."
A temporary roof was put up for them outside the government hospital where the medical group worked, he said.
The largest of four hospitals on the island, it had 60 to 70 beds, and more were set up by the AMM, Sy said. "We had a lot of help from local doctors and nurses."
He said the volunteers probably got only four or five hours of sleep every night. "We can handle it but it was exhausting."
Lum and Laura Pak, also a Honolulu surgeon, stayed after the others left to take more cases. Pak stayed several days and Lum remained for a week, returning last Sunday.
It was the fourth Aloha Medical Mission this year for Lum, who retired from his practice 10 years ago. He went on one mission to Bangladesh and two to Laos.
He said the group used up the anesthetic gas that it took to Palawan, and he had trouble getting some after everyone left. Finally, with great difficulty, he made arrangements to have it flown from Manila, he said.
He also had to fly in an anesthesiologist since the three with the mission left and the local anesthesiologist couldn't take care of all the cases, he said.
He did 50 surgical procedures during his last week, including those when Pak was still there, he said.
Electrical blackouts occurred at night, and there were "brownouts every day off and on," Lum said. "Some of my operations were done with a flashlight."He said the group operated on many thyroid goiters, some as large as a baseball. While such goiters usually are attributed to an iodine deficiency, he doesn't believe that is a problem on Palawan because the people eat a lot of seafood.
He thinks goiters there are caused by eating kassava, a root similar to a potato. It is a staple food at Palawan and has a substance that can cause goiters, Lum said.
"I was telling all my patients in Palawan not to eat kassava, to eat more seafood and to use iodized salt. It is really a public health problem in Third World countries. They should really spread the word, the health department, about iodized salt and not eating things like kassava. So part of our mission is to try to educate people."
He said the people were appreciative of the team's services.
"If we don't go there, they just don't get the surgical care they need."
They operated on a lot of children, many of whom were born with hernias, he said. They also operated on patients with breast cancer so advanced in some cases they were inoperable. But they did catch one fairly early, he said. "I think she'll have a good result."
They also operated on people with cataracts, cleft palates, harelips and abdominal tumors.
Lum said they saw a little boy, about 6, running around with a severe limp from a chronically dislocated hip, but they had no orthopedic surgeon with them. "We couldn't help him. We asked them to try to get the child to Manila."
"This mission, everything happened," Sy said. Besides coping with the weather and logistics during the mission, he was beset with personal problems and shaken by an earthquake.
His wife got food poisoning the first night, he said, and he had to wake up three doctors from the team to help her. She remained behind with relatives in Manila, sick for three days, while he went on the mission.
Her mother died while they were there, and while in Manila they experienced a strong earthquake. "In the hotel everything was moving," Sy said.
Volunteers in the nonprofit Aloha Medical Mission have provided free medical and surgical services to more than 300,000 patients in Southeast Asia since 1983. They have performed more than 5,000 operations.
The state Legislature has named the mission "Hawaii's Ambassadors of Goodwill."
