Berkman 914 Obras Day 5 – Thursday
Let Your Light Shine
Dr. Hsin led our devotional this morning with a line from Matthew: you are the light of the world, so let your light shine before others. He told us we’ve been exactly that all week – lights to people, in ways we probably don’t even realize yet. We prayed for patients by name one more time: Hector, Bianca, Jose Pablo, and more.
Then, like yesterday, we went around the group and just talked. Victoria said being a translator here has been its own kind of gift – you feel the words firsthand, and somehow they land heavier here than they ever do back home. She brought up Ramon again, the boxer who told her he’d save her a seat in heaven. Laura, our OT, sat in on a difficult repair this week and said what struck her most wasn’t the surgery itself – it was watching the surgical team adjust the same plate three times, just to get it exactly right for one patient. She said we undervalue our own skills sometimes, when really, whatever you have to offer is a real gift to give the world.
Raina told us something more personal. She’s living with melanoma, with a PET scan every three months to keep watch on it. A scholarship covered enough of this trip’s cost that she was able to come at all. Because she could, somewhere between seventy-five and eighty patients this week got her hands-on care instead of going without it.
She said it’s hard to put into words what that felt like – managing something like that, and still getting to be the one giving care instead of needing it herself. Someone lightening her load is what let her go lighten someone else’s. That’s the part of this mission that never makes it onto a stat sheet: it’s not just what patients receive, it’s who gets to show up and give it.
Glenn, one of our scrub techs, has been in this field for thirty-five years. He’s watched plenty of people lose the passion for it over time. Not this group, he said – you can tell everyone here actually came to help. Kathleen talked about how peaceful the recovery room has felt all week. No TVs. Just quiet contentment and healing.
Dr. Erik Berkman told us about a knee he operated on this week, so locked up with rheumatoid arthritis it could barely move at all. When he went to tell the patient’s wife how it went, she started crying. Then he did too. “You’ve changed our lives,” she told him, and gave him a hug he says he won’t forget.
In recovery, Anderson and Diego held their own little reunion with the team – tongues out, like nothing had happened at all. Dr. Dan Ocel checked on them both and said it’s the best outcome either could’ve hoped for; casts come off soon, and they’ll be back to causing trouble in no time. Two of our team members, Addie and Maja, made a special trip into town just for them – candy, and a small dog toy for each boy.
Gummy worms were promised earlier this week, and rest assured, gummy worms were delivered. Their mom and grandma looked genuinely surprised the gifts were meant for them at all. The littlest patients on this trip may have left the biggest mark.
Cristóbal, still working through recovery on the knee Dr. Berkman called the worst he’s seen in thirty years, said today he’s finally feeling a little better. Hannah just looked on, amazed. “He must be so excited,” she said.
In the mobility clinic, Dr. Michelle Henderson has spent the week doing more than orthopedics – being asked about blood pressure and diabetes, looking in patients’ ears, anything a patient needs that day, whether or not it’s technically her specialty. One patient came in with an infection that’s gone untreated for twenty-five years. He doesn’t want a wheelchair. He wants a walker, and he’s not budging on it.
Manuel, 32, came in with an old spinal cord injury from a gunshot wound. He’s paraplegic, and the wheelchair he’d been getting around in for years showed every bit of it – dented, one wheel barely turning straight, the armrests barely held together. The team sent him home with a new one, encouraged him to keep exercising, and gave him something for the pain.
Not every story today ended that way. Being the light doesn’t mean everything around you already is one – sometimes it just means walking straight into the parts that aren’t, and staying anyway.
Teresa arrived with community members who help care for her – she lives alone, and it’s neighbors, not family, who carry her most places she needs to go. She hasn’t walked in fifteen years, since a spinal injury she says came from years of abuse by her former husband. She’s since divorced him. The numbness in her lower back has never gone away, and years spent in a wheelchair have left her knees permanently bent, stuck that way, which keeps her in near-constant pain. While she was there, she had a seizure. The community members with her barely reacted – they said it happens regularly, and calmly walked her through it the same way they clearly have before. Our team got her seen by the ER doctor before she left. There’s a surgery that could loosen her legs and ease some of that pain, even if walking again isn’t possible. She asked to be put on the waiting list for it, and left today with a wheelchair and something for the pain in the meantime.
Miguel got word this week that he now has a real connection to a med school in Mexico. Neuroscience, his dream since we met him, is starting to look less like a someday and more like a plan. And more than once today, we caught Andre wandering the clinic looking for Raina after she stepped away to watch a surgery – the two of them, still finding each other all week.
In the pharmacy, Jake spent time before the trip even started prepping medication labels and color-coding them, just to make one more thing easier for the patients who’d need them. It’s a small thing. It’s also exactly the kind of thing this whole week has been made of.
Fifteen surgeries happened today – more than sixty total for the week. Shania Twain played through the last of the knee replacements. And one by one, our team walked out of the OR for the final time this trip, looking at it all a little differently than we did on Sunday.
Let your light shine, we were told this morning. All week, most of us had no idea we already were. If you want proof, here’s the easy version: 63 surgeries this week. Somewhere between 70 and 80 wheelchairs, built by hand, one at a time. Say it out loud, and it sounds like a lot. It is. But it’s not what we’ll remember first.
