Peru trip allows team to focus on helping, not politics

July 06--Iquitos, Peru, is the kind of place where even a cold shower cannot dispel the clammy layer of equator-adjacent sweat. The city of nearly half a million people sits right on the cusp of the Amazon rainforest in the northeastern corner of the country, bordered by Colombia to the north and Brazil to the east. Humidity hovers around 85 percent, with temperatures in the high 80s this time of year.

Here, paved roads give way to bumpy sand once you get outside the city's center or its thoroughfares, sand that becomes nearly impassable in the heavy jungle rains that come about once a day during the winter. The primary mode of transportation is to hail one of the thousands of moto-taxis -- similar to a tuk-tuk in Asia but less substantial -- a three-wheeled motorcycle with a covered bench seat over the back two wheels that careen around with little regard for traffic laws, if there are any.

Though it's one of the biggest cities in Peru, Iquitos only has two public hospitals, and they're vastly inadequate against the city's population and tendency toward violent motor accidents. If you're wealthy, you might have access to the more expensive private clinics; if you're not seriously injured or ill, your state insurance coverage helps with some basic medical costs. But much of the time, the poor go without, and common conditions like hernias go untreated for years.

I've been writing about Dr. Jason Cundiff's medical mission trips for the past three years, meeting with him and various team members before they leave and after they come back to learn of the surgeries conducted, the difficulties surmounted, the lessons learned. But hearing about it after the fact can never quite match the experience of seeing it firsthand, and I've always wanted to go on a trip myself. This year, I decided to buy the plane ticket, take the vacation time and do it.

It's very easy to become cynical about medicine, especially if you write about it on a near-daily basis. There are so many things wrong with our health care system and no one seems to have a clear idea of how to fix it. Doctors think one thing; insurance brokers think something else; hospital administrators have their own point of view. And stuck in the middle, patients are just trying to figure it all out without incurring medical debt or even going bankrupt.

All of that disappeared in Peru. In Peru, the medical team just helped people. They used the skills they've honed over years of practice to care for those who needed it, staying at the clinic from 9 a.m. to midnight to make sure everyone was seen, completing 29 surgeries in four days. And they did it smiling.

You hear horror stories of prima donna doctors and surgeons in U.S. hospitals, those who scream at nurses and throw up their hands saying, "I can't work in these conditions!" I'd like to see one of them thrust into the "conditions" in Iquitos: an air conditioner that blew fine black dust all over the sterile field in the operating room; children who wouldn't stop crying because there was no numbing medication to help get the IV in; an autoclave that didn't work, which meant there were no sterile instruments until that got figured out; medications in different dosages or under different names than in the States; needles that were the wrong size -- the list goes on. Things that doctors don't even have to worry about here -- like getting their sterile instruments on time -- became everyone's problem.

The last night at the clinic, surgeries stretched on for so long that the final patient didn't have time to recover from the procedure and anesthesia before the team was ready to go home. So three members of the team -- a medical student, a nurse and a scrub tech -- stayed the night, catching a few moments of sleep when they could but always jumping up to answer the patient's call. They were a bit like zombies the next day, but none of them complained. Instead, they repeated how glad they were that the woman got her surgery.

Obviously, a medical mission trip to Peru and the daily practice of medicine in the U.S. cannot be compared. The doctors in Peru deal with government corruption and an overwhelming population that Cundiff's team didn't have to worry about. Such is the privilege of a weeklong adventure. And obviously, there is great need within our own borders for medical care and volunteers to provide it. Four days of surgeries do not solve a country's underlying problems, neither here nor in Peru.

But for 29 people, it made all the difference in the world.

And for the 14 people on the medical team, it offered a reminder of why they got into medicine in the first place.

Almost makes me want to become a doctor.

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