Mike - Mission Update

The mission is going along in a surprisingly smooth manner. We arrived in Chivay late morning on Tuesday. The clinic was in a bit of disarray but the crew all pitched in cleaning, arranging furniture and as Dr Bailey says "improvising". By 8pm we had a spotless operating room; equipment installed the anesthesiologist set up and a well organized exam room. All the medicine arrived on time and the only heart stopper was when the brand new autoclave did not work. No worries we found another one that had not even been unpacked out of its box: it fired on the first try. The first patient arrived that evening asking for an eye exam even though the clinic was not scheduled to open until Thursday. Never mind Roberto said he would wait. At least 75 years of age he was back at 8 am on Wednesday. By then we had most of the bugs worked out and decided to screen patients and begin operating a day early. Roberto would become our first cataract patient.

We arrived Wednesday morning to a growing line of patients asking to be screened. The Insight Peru team swung into action and the eye drops hit Roberto's eyes at 1:00 pm. By 2:00pm Dr Dean Durkin was operating on Roberto and upon finishing the operation said "one down 219 to go". He completed 4 operations the first afternoon: Two that turned out to be tough cases. Roberto will be back at 1:00 pm on Thursday to get his patch off. Dr Durkin says that many of the patients will be able to see clearly straight away, others will experience blurry vision for a few days after the operation.

Dr Chris Brown, the second surgeon, arrived on Wednesday afternoon fresh from hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu. The team will begin at 7:00 am in the morning and hope to complete 20--25 surgeries by days end. These Aussies are awesome.

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