Day six started with rounds in the recovery ward after a great devotional including a reading from Galatians reminding us that even the hardest things we do in life have a greater purpose, a root in our faith, and they can be connected to things in ways that we most times cannot understand. These words were a perfect way to give the team all the inspiration needed to push through one more day of surgeries, just as much as the smiles and hugs in the recovery ward.
After checking on our new friends Zoila and Evelyn on recovery, among others, the team worked their way through another full day of surgeries, bringing the total number of patients in four days up to 147 with the total number of surgeries surpassing 200!!!
Would you like more numbers and statistics?
How about these:
Five operating rooms, six surgeons (on two General, one Gynecology, and two ENT teams), two pharmacists, eight MD and CRNA on the anesthesia team, four retired nurses, three married couples, two non-medical daughters of current and past team members, two official interpreters, a half dozen additional team members fluent in Spanish, one native Guatemalan, three team members born in France, a clergy with two adopted Guatemalan children, and an engineer and an architect….all with over 200 medical missions to Guatemala combined, connected forever to countless people this week they may never see again…
Whew…
With only another day of rounds and a free day in Guatemala, I leave you with this:
There’s a movie line that I love to tell that’s definitely not mine, but it is the best way I have found to explain what it’s like to be an architect and a storyteller on a trip like this. It’s possible that I have used it before in an entry or two, but I’ll say it again anyway.
The story goes that a young child asked his grandfather if he was a hero in a great world war. The grandfather stopped and said quickly “no, I was not a hero, but I served in a company of heroes.”
That answer is the spirit of this team, and what I feel every year that I am fortunate enough to be a witness to what they do without reservation, and without fully understanding what effects it will have on their patients and even themselves….and that is the definition of a hero to me.
Erin Joseph Machac, Blogger
