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Our first evening at Tenwek Dr. Russ, the Chief Surgeon, invited all of us to his home to meet everyone and to get us all acquainted with life at Tenwek. Of course, the adrenaline was running high, we all had a gajillion questions to ask (well, I did anyway). We talked about the patients, the types of cases he sees, what his typical day is like, etc.
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One of the things that we would quickly learn is that "typical" describes very little at this mission hospital in Western Kenya. The most intriguing part of the night for me was the collection of 8 arrow-heads that he removed during an 8-hour shift at the hospital from a tribal uprising in the past. I just couldn't imagine that kind of barbaric behavior. I had become used to gunshot and knife wounds during my years at LA County Hospital in East LA, but arrows and machete's???
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That morning, my buddy Robb (see photo lower left) and I took off for the hospital to try and make sense out of all the equipment we had brought with us, and to find all the supplies that had been shipped to Tenwek from other parts of the United States in preparation for the first-ever open heart procedures at Tenwek Hospital.
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As you can tell from the photos above, we had an overwhelming task to not only find everything, but to sort it out, figure out what we had, make sure everything was there so we could actually do an open-heart, transport it all to the cardiac operating room and then we had to find the heart-lung machine and put it together and make sure it was in operating condition as well. All before our first patient was brought into the OR tomorrow morning. Thank goodness Robb was a quick study and adapted quickly to all the surgical paraphernalia because there is no way I could have done it by myself.
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As we were transporting equipment back and forth to the OR, Dr. Russ came down to the cardiac OR to let me know he was preparing to operate on a patient that had been shot in the neck with an arrow and asked if I wanted to come watch him remove it!!!
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OK, so subtlety was not my strong point during my time at Tenwek, and my enthusiasm over his arrow-ectomy display the evening before was more than a little evident. So as I dropped what I was doing and followed him very anxiously and obediently down the hall to the adjoining OR, all I could think was, how am I going to get some photos of this? No one back home is ever gonna believe this one! As Dr. Russ rounded the corner through the door to the OR, he turned back to me and casually said, "and take as many pictures as you want, Tom". That's all "Camera Guy" needed to hear!
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