Berkman 914 Obras Day 3 – Tuesday
What We Carry
This morning’s devotional came from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians – the part where he begs God to take his weakness away, and God tells him no instead. Grace is enough. Our chaplain also read us a few lines from Guatemalan poet Julia Esquivel, about how someone else’s grief only becomes real to us once we’ve done our own share of weeping. Put simply, today’s invitation was to let our own weakness be seen, and to believe in someone else before they’re ready to believe in themselves. And that showed up almost everywhere we looked.
Emmanuel, in for a meniscus tear, is already learning how to use his brace, and had one question for the team: when can he play football again. Six weeks, Dr. Joe Hsin told him – not the answer he was hoping for, but at least this time, when he’s back on the field, it won’t hurt to run on it.
Then there was Matthew, seventeen. A firework blew up in his hand years ago and took most of it with it – not just a couple fingers, but nearly everything he’d need to hold onto something with. Dr. Carl Palumbo and Dr. Matthew Koepplinger operated on him yesterday to free tendons that had scarred down and stuck in place ever since.
Today, on rounds, they came back to check on him, and Laura, the team’s OT, came right along with them. It’s not a full hand again, and it won’t be, but for the first time in years, he’ll actually be able to hold onto things again. When we asked what he wanted most, he grinned and said he couldn’t wait to get home and show his family.
In the mobility clinic, Dr. Michelle Henderson is still mentoring Miguel, and today asked more of him than she had yet. A woman came through who was in a motorcycle accident twenty years ago. In the seconds before impact, with her own body about to take the full weight of the crash, she wrapped herself around her baby and held on, all the way through it.
The baby walked away without a single mark. She didn’t. The wreck left her paraplegic, and for twenty years since, she’s raised that same child, had another one, and kept living, all from a chair. She’d come today hoping for a different answer than the one waiting for her. It won’t change. Miguel was the one translating for her, which meant the hard news would have to come from him. Dr. Henderson stood right beside him the whole time, close enough to catch him if he needed it, coaching him through finding the words himself instead of just handing him a line to repeat. Afterward, she told Miguel she wants to take him and his mom out to dinner before the week is over, just to thank him for the work he’s put in. Dr. Henderson has spent a long career making room for people like him, young, still learning, worth investing in, the way a grandmother makes room at her own table – the same way she’s been making room for her own granddaughter, Maddie, all week. Today Maddie traded the wheelchair clinic for the OR, assisting and learning right alongside the surgical team.
A father brought his son, Jhonatan, in with multiple fractures in his foot. He’d already had surgery for it in their city, but the wound looked dirty enough that his father got scared about infection and brought him in. The team cleaned and redressed it and built him a new splint right there in the clinic – Miguel pulled on gloves to help hold it in place, and Kathleen stepped away from the wheelchairs she and the team build more than thirty of, every single day, to hold his leg steady while the plaster set. When Jhonatan stood up and walked out on his own, his father hugged everyone.
From there he went straight to PT with Jackie Geddes, who fitted him for a walker and showed him, hands-on, how to use it until he’s fully healed. Jackie never just explains an exercise – she gets in and does it alongside every patient. If she had more time with each person who came through, she thinks she could have most of them walking with real confidence by the end of the week. She doesn’t have that kind of time this week, but she still gives what she has.
Raina, one of the team’s occupational therapists, has Andre alongside her this week – his mom is volunteering right in the same clinic. Andre’s headed for a career in tech, not medicine, but he came anyway, just for the experience of it. The two of them spent the day fitting patients for wheelchairs, cracking jokes back and forth the whole time. Luisa, 92, joked with the whole team about how strong all that wheelchair lifting must be making their arms. Handed a cup of water between fittings, she made a face. She only drinks Pepsi, she told Raina.
Nearby, Anyeli carried a stuffed bunny everywhere she went and asked for a picture with the whole team before she left. She has spina bifida, and Raina took the time to personally modify her new wheelchair so her feet would finally have somewhere to rest.
Back in the OR, Dr. Palumbo and Dr. Koepplinger – the same two who’d operated on Matthew the day before – worked on Alfredo, whose gout has left his elbow so swollen and painful that he hasn’t been able to rest his arm down or sleep on that side in years. Lynn McIntosh helped keep the whole room moving while they worked. She’d put on Maná, and the OR spent the afternoon full of Spanish rock instead of the usual quiet.
Ramon was in that same room later. He grew up in Guatemala, then spent fifteen years in Houston working in sales at a grocery store, before he was deported back home. Boxing as a hobby had already caught up with his right elbow by then. When he found out Victoria’s father-in-law used to work for that same company back in Texas, something in him softened – it’s not the first time Victoria’s had that effect on a patient this week. “I will remember you forever,” he told her. “I’ll wait for you in heaven and save you a seat.”
Dr. Adam Klein and Dr. Erik Berkman gave four patients, including Feliz Garcia, brand new knees today. Afterward, Adam went out to find her family, who’d been waiting the whole time, and told them what he tells every family in that spot: he hopes she loves it, and that her recovery is an easy one.
The most complicated case of the day belonged to Dr. Rav Khazai, a trauma surgeon working on a 17-year-old with a leg bent nearly ninety degrees from a bone condition other surgeons had already turned away. He’d known about this case for months and had consulted his own mentors ahead of time to prepare. When he finally opened the leg, the bone underneath was rubbery in some places and crumbling in others. He took out what didn’t belong, packed in bone graft, and closed it back up. A six-inch difference in leg length is now closer to one. Back in the mobility clinic, his wife, Jackie, spent the same hours seeing her own PT patients. She saw firsthand the months he spent preparing for this one, and that he wasn’t in there alone. She wasn’t worried about him – she’s known him long enough to know he could do it.
Seventeen surgeries happened today, two more than yesterday. But trust showed up everywhere today, not just in the OR. A young man, trusting Dr. Khazai with a leg no one else would touch. Kathleen, trusting her own hands to hold a stranger’s son steady.
Raina and Andre, trusting each other enough to spend the day laughing and bonding over wheelchair fittings. Dr. Henderson, trusting her own translator with the hardest news of the day, staying close enough to catch him if he needed it. Grace is enough, our chaplain told us this morning – not because our weakness disappears, but because we’re not the only ones carrying it.
Today, none of us carried anything alone.
Even the wheelchairs got a ride – strapped to the roof of the bus to Casa de Fe, trusting they’d make it there just the same as the people who’ll be using them.
