Groundhog Day.

After a decent day of sterilizing and surgeries we had thought we were into clear sailing – not to be. At 3 am the hospital was good enough to let us know that the sterilizer had gone down again and that as soon as it was sorted out they would put our sets back in. It’s so important to have that kind of communication; because it’s not really that there are issues – there are always going to be issues – it’s the willingness to solve them. More importantly to solve them together, with respect for their staff, and their needs at the same time as ours.

We are fortunate to have that kind of support from the hospital and so once again their engineer headed over to sort out the problem. At 5 am our instruments went back into the sterilizer.

Our team gets up early. We have breakfast and a briefing at 6;30 am on the day’s cases and depending on the time available the previous day or days cases as well. Generally our intent is to get started at or close to 8 am. Our goal today was 14 cases – 2 more than the previous day and the most of any day this trip, so news of a sterilizer setback dropped our spirits and hopes a little bit.

Fortunately we were ready to go by 9 am and our 14 case schedule for the day began (12 total hip replacements, 1 Peri-Acetabular Osteotomy & 1 hardware removal). From a previous blog you might have already been aware of the 90 min sterilization cycle, which meant that we would start the day off slowly since the round time to sterilize and cool the instruments would inevitably create delays.
Throughout the day we managed to organize the longer cases to help round out sterilization turn around times and we were able to maintain steady progress. We worked into the evening and finished around 10 pm meaning the ward and post op recovery were able to finish near 11 – 14 cases …hecho – as they say in Ecuador – done!

This year’s operative mission finished up with 52 cases done – the most so far with sincere gratitude to our partners here in Ecuador Santa Ines Hospital, Rotary Club of Yanuncay), donors in Canada and TNM volunteers who together have significantly improved the lives of 52 people and 52 families – a substantial and significant accomplishment.