Who Are We Anyway???

.
THE FIRST WAVE... of clinical staff from the Vanderbilt Pediatric Heart Institute left Nashville on November 5th, 2008. Our entire group made their way to Kenya in two groups over a 5 day period. The photos over the next few posts will introduce you to the people on "Team Tenwek" who gave of themselves to make open-heart surgery a reality at Tenwek Hospital.
.
Dr. Staci is a cardiologist on our team. She (along with Dr. Mike) is responsible for performing all the pre-operative and post-operative studies on the patients. After performing the echocardiographical studies, she reports pertinent information back to the surgeons so decisions can be made regarding which patients to operate on, and when, based on the severity of their disease process. She operates the echocardiography machine that allows the cardiologists and surgeons to visualize structural aspects of the heart as well as direction and velocity of blood flow within the heart and the major vessels of the heart. After each surgical repair, she verifies the surgical repairs via a transesophogeal probe that is placed in the patient's esophagus. This gives her and our team a real-time view of the surgical repair before the patient is transported from the operating room to the intesive care unit. Without this technology and her expertise, we could not do what we do - as well as we do it - day after day.
.
Lucky for us, Staci's husband Robb came with her on this trip. Although he was one of the "non-medical" members of our team, he quickly became indespensable in the OR and ICU on a daily basis. I would not have been able to do my job as effectively as I did, if it weren't for Robb in the background gathering, organizing and securing the supplies that I needed. Robb is a counselor at a special needs school in Nashville and a professional puppeteer. Thank goodness for his willingness to help AND his comic relief during our stay at Tenwek.
.
.
.
Now for me... my name is Tom and I'm one of 3 perfusionists at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. I operate the heart-lung machine during open-heart procedures. The surgeon places large pieces of tubing into the patient's heart that drains the blood out of the patient into the heart-lung machine that I operate. During the operation, we stop the heart so the surgeon can operate on it.
.
.
.
.
.
While the heart is stopped, the heart-lung machine performs the work of the heart and lungs; it oxygenates the blood and removes carbon dioxide (i.e. the lungs) and pumps the blood back to the patient (i.e. the heart) which allows us to generate a blood pressure that sustains the patient while their heart is stopped. We administer medications and anesthetic gas to the patient while we are supporting them on bypass. We also cool the patient's body temperature down (a protective mechanism) and warm them back up toward the end of bypass so the heart can be restarted and the patient weaned from the heart-lung machine.
.
When I wasn't on bypass, I was "Camera Guy", taking pictures of pretty much anything and everything around me.
.
Stay tuned for more team posts...