American Doctors
Recently my wife took me to watch a
documentary movie called ‘American Doctor’. The movie follows three American
doctors who volunteer their time in 2025 in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.
Watching the war’s effects on civilians, particularly the children was
extremely hard for me. There was one scene in particular in which an
American surgeon was teaching a local surgeon his techniques that gave me a
flash back from my own life.
To be very clear my circumstances
were nothing like the movie. There was no war. I was a young resident in Trauma and
Orthopedic surgery, and a surgical team from the United States had come to
volunteer at our hospital on behalf of the Rotary Club. This was 1992 in the
small town of Zaria in Northern Nigeria where I had grown up. This was a university hospital where I
had just started working. The only similarity were the volunteer American
doctors
There were two Orthopedic surgeons
in that team. I still remember them vividly and both have unfortunately passed
on. Dr. Richard Slager was from Columbus, Ohio and Dr. Sam Amuso was from Hershey,
Pennsylvania. They brought a lot of equipment and did several surgeries in the
week they were there. In one surgery Dr. Slager taught me how to do a
corrective osteotomy (straightening a bowed leg) in the American way. At another time Dr. Amuso presented me
with his personal set of textbooks on Orthopedic Surgery. Being from Hershey,
he brought lots of Hershey chocolates which he distributed freely. I still
remember him joking that he lived near ‘3-mile island’ (the site of a nuclear
accident in 1979) and that he glows in the dark!
During their short visit, I learnt
a lot from these doctors. It was commendable that they came all the way to our
small town in Africa and donated so much time and equipment to the hospital.
Even after they left, one incident of the positive aspects of their trip comes
to mind.
It was a few weeks after they had
left, and I was on call. A 14-year-old boy was brought into the Emergency room.
He had been working on a local grinding machine to grind corn, when his right arm
got pulled into the machine and got pulled off. He just had a small piece of his upper arm bone sticking out. Luckily, he had stopped bleeding, but could start bleeding
any minute. The bone was too short to do an amputation. The upper arm bone had
to be removed from the joint. In other words, he needed a shoulder
disarticulation. I had done many amputations before, and knew how
disarticulations are done, but had never done one before. Unfortunately, there was no time to wait
for the consultant.
So, I pulled out Dr. Amuso’s
textbook, “Campbell’s Operative Orthopedics”. There were detailed instructions in this book on how to do the disarticulation. We rushed the kid to the
operating room and I first tied the major blood vessels to prevent bleeding,
then proceeded step by step to disarticulate the remaining stump from the
shoulder.
It actually went very well as I was
otherwise well versed in surgical technique, and I was able to close the wound
neatly. The boy healed well and was able to be discharged from the hospital quickly. He was missing
an arm, but he was otherwise alive and healthy.
In 1993, I came to America and
trained in Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease. I look back at my
time in Orthopedics and have some great memories. In particular I remember the
selflessness and the humanity of these American doctors. This was something I saw again, in
the movie today.
