The Radu family put us in touch with the Italian Bruno, who runs a children's hospital for the Vatican in Takeo, Cambodia. Our team for this mission consisted of Dr. Klaus Exner, Dr. Christian Radu and myself, Dr. Bianca Baican, as plastic surgeons and Dr. Genia Kunits and Dr. Maria Falk as anaesthetists.
We traveled to Takeo via Hong Kong and Pnom Penh with over 500 kg of excess baggage. The hospital had only been built a few years previously with the support of the Vatican and was therefore new and very clean. Many children presented to us with cleft lips and palates, various tumors and injuries following burns.
We remember a little boy with severe burn scars on his face and arm, so that he could no longer lift it. Although he was only 5 years old, he didn't shed a tear when the needle for the anesthetic was inserted, looked at us and said that he wanted to do what we were doing when he grew up. The little boy was so brave. His operation went well and he was able to start exercising his arm soon after the operation.
As villages in Cambodia are connected by many waterways and medical care is not available everywhere, the hospital offered a "mobile clinic" once a month. We traveled by boat to a village about 2 hours away, where we set up a small examination camp in a school. In addition to us as surgeons and anaesthetists, we were joined by a number of internists, pediatricians and nursing staff who vaccinated the children on site, applied bandages or, like us, examined the patients who presented themselves to us. They came with many different concerns, from twisted feet and malaria to highly suspected tuberculosis, we saw everything and had to decide whether to send the patients to the clinic immediately or whether we could treat them on site.
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