Berkman 914 Obras Day 2 – Monday
The Hands We’re Given
This morning’s devotional started with Moses and a bush that burned without being consumed. Our chaplain, Linda McCarty, told us that if we looked today – really looked – we’d see God somewhere in the middle of it, not off to the side of the work but inside it. She read us Teresa of Ávila’s words: God has no hands on earth but ours. Then she asked something harder than that: to actually pay attention. To stop when the noise and the newness threatened to pull us past a moment that mattered, and let ourselves see what was actually in front of us. Somewhere today, she said, we’d see God’s face in a patient we hadn’t met yet.
By the time we reached the clinic, that idea had already found its way into the rooms waiting for us.
In the wheelchair clinic, Maddie and Hannah needed only one day to go from learning how the frames go together to teaching other volunteers how to build them. This morning, they crouched beside a new volunteer, Kim Ocel, guiding her hands through where each bolt goes.
The OR ran fifteen surgeries today across four rooms: trauma, knees, hands and feet, and sports medicine. In room three, Dr. Joe Hsin and Dr. Robert Fullick ran through three knee scopes, a shoulder, an ACL, and a clavicle – including an extra case their team has managed to add onto every single day this week. “We’re already here,” one of them said. “Let’s help as many as we can.”
Dr. Hsin likes to keep the OR filled with country and western – the kind of detail you don’t expect from a surgeon mid-case, but one that makes the room feel a little less like a hospital and a little more familiar.
Patients bring their own comfort where they can. Some carried the same blanket into every surgery this week, one familiar thing from home that made it all the way here with them.
Norma Elizabeth was one of them, in today for a bunion and hammertoe repair, three of her own kids waiting just outside the OR doors for her. She matched Dr. Dan Ocel’s humor before she’d even gone under. When he marked her leg, she pointed to the other one. “Don’t touch that one,” she said, grinning.
Then it was time for the nerve block, and the grinning faded. Anesthesiologist Dr. Ken Tiojanco worked the needle in slowly, talking her through each second of it. Victoria Wood stayed right beside her, her hand on Norma’s, saying the same soft, steady things again and again as Norma’s eyes started to close – one mother to another, two kids of her own waiting for her back home too. When Linda knelt beside the table to pray over her – out loud, in Spanish, her hand resting on Norma’s shoulder the way you’d rest a hand on someone you loved – Victoria stayed right there too, praying along with her, never letting go of Norma’s hand the whole time.
Three kids were still waiting on the other side of that door. They didn’t know all of what was happening to their mother, only that she’d come back to them soon, and that when she did, she’d be able to carry them with a little less pain than she’d walked in with.
Dr. Erik Berkman took on a total knee replacement so far gone from arthritis there was no repair left to try, only replacement. Between cases, the local staff at Obras turned each room over fast enough that the day never really stopped moving – clean, ready, next patient, all fifteen times through.
In the mobility clinic, Juana, 83, came in from Villa Canales, brought by her children. A motorcycle hit her months ago, and her arm has been bent backward ever since – the elbow dislocated, never treated. On top of that, she’s been struggling just to get around on her own. The team sent her for X-rays to see if anything can still be done for the arm and fitted her for a wheelchair.
Augustina came in behind her, also from Villa Canales, her dialect different enough that a second interpreter had to be called in before the team could even begin. Her husband, Apolonio, never left her side. When we asked how long they’d been married, he answered before we’d even finished asking. “Sixty-six years,” he said – no pause, no counting on his fingers, like it was the easiest thing anyone had asked him all day. As the team fitted her for a wheelchair, she reached over and held his hand the whole time.
Casa de Fe sits about half a mile from Obras. Patients stay there through the whole week – fed, housed, three meals a day, for as long as their surgery and recovery take. When it’s full, Faith in Practice pays for a hotel instead so no one gets turned away. Families come from all over the country and end up under the same roof, strangers to each other on Sunday and something closer to neighbors by Friday.
More than one has said, quietly, that it feels too nice for them – that they don’t know what to do with a bed this comfortable, or a plate this full, three times a day, with nothing owed in return. It’s been doing this work for 23 years now. An estimated half a million people have walked through its doors since it opened. Every Wednesday, the abuelas come and pray – no one currently there remembers exactly when that started, or why, only that it does. This week the halls are full enough that pews have been pushed together to make room for more beds.
One man worked a crossword puzzle alone in the courtyard, peacefully unhurried, like he had nowhere else he needed to be. Diego, four, came looking for us, even without the gummy worms today, and made sure we knew exactly how he felt about that – arms crossed, a grin he couldn’t quite hold onto, already forgiving us before we’d apologized for our lack of candy.
By the end of the day, Dr. Hsin had to turn away seventeen people who’d come hoping to be seen, simply because there weren’t enough hours or hands to reach them all. It’s the plainest reminder of why teams like this one matter – for every patient who makes it through the door, there’s someone still waiting on the other side of it.
Dr. Dan Ocel, along with his interpreter Victoria, spent the day treating patients with the same humor Dan’s known for, and one of the patients who came through was Lesly. For eighteen years, Lesly has been the one showing up to serve on these trips as a volunteer, not the one being treated. This time, she came through the clinic herself, with a plantar fibroma that needed care, and Linda McCarty, Faith in Practice’s former CEO of fifteen years and this week’s chaplin, sat alongside her the whole time she was seen. Dr. Ocel gave her an injection along with a physical therapy referral to help loosen the tissue. “Don’t worry,” he told her, only half serious, “it’s not going to hurt me at all.” She laughed, and when he noticed her Vans sneakers, he asked, straight-faced, if she was secretly a skateboarder. The relief, when it came, was immediate, and so was the laughter.
