Day 5
This has been an incredible week, full of incredible experiences. We completed 62 surgeries this week, from knee replacements to hip revisions, scar removals to ear and facial reconstruction, with 4 ORs.
We have had our hearts touched by the patients we’ve served and come close as a team through working together, spicy pepper challenges, corny dad jokes, and playful rivalry between the orthopedic and plastic surgeons as to which the students would specialize in.
One thing that stood out to me this week was a witty comment made by Doctor Hopkins after beginning each plastic surgery I observed. He would say, “Step one of plastic surgery: Make the problem worse. Completed! Now we fix it.” This seemed to be true for every surgery, in fact. In order for the pain that these patients experienced to be relieved, they had to endure something much more painful. While our anesthesiologists and nurses made sure that a majority of their pain was mediated, there were still lingering sensations and decreased mobility immediately following the procedures. I spoke with one young woman who was treated for hip dysplasia. She told me, crying, as she waited for some of her pain medication to kick in, that she had at least been able to walk before, but now she could barely move. I began to understand that she believed she would always feel like this. I explained to her that this wasn’t the case, that in just a few days, she would be on her feet again, slower than before, but ultimately healing in a way that would give her more ability to walk than she had ever had.
There were some times this week when I felt inadequate to help patients who were experiencing pain. I’m not fluent in Spanish and have no authority to administer medication. I’ve also never experienced that kind of discomfort, because I’ve never had some of the chronic issues that our patients had. There is one person, however, who has experienced all of their (and our) pain, and more, someone who knows exactly how to fix it.
Jesus Christ was the ultimate good samaritan, the person who was of the most service to every individual who has ever lived. In order for us to be able to heal, to forgive, to improve, to repair, and to live again, he underwent the most painful experience in the history of mankind. He felt the bones break, the skin tear, the muscle fail. He felt the incision, the sawing, and the screwing. He felt the stitches, the disorientation of coming off of anesthesia. He felt the cold, the confusion, the nausea. He felt the soreness and throbbing of recovery and the wondering of that young woman if she would ever feel better or ever walk again. He did this so that he could perfectly understand our pain.
The symbol of the cross is prevalent all across the world as a reminder of Jesus’s suffering on our behalf, and while this is a pivotal part of the Atonement, even more significant is the empty tomb and the promise that healing comes. For our patients, healing does come, and because of the surgeries, they heal even better than before. They are given a new, better quality of life, because of the surgery they underwent.
I saw Christ’s light so much this week. I saw it in every volunteer that gave up their time to come help strangers live better. I saw it in the patients as their joy and graciousness infected each one of us through kindness and love. I saw it in the OR, where teams worked together to provide the best service to their patients, and to the many of us who dealt with a language barrier but managed to make friends anyways, because Christ’s love (and cute stuffed animals) are universal languages.
It is because of Him and His Atonement that we can heal, both spiritually and physically, and because of Him that my friend with hip dysplasia, who worried about whether she would be able to be mobile again, left the hospital walking.
