Our anesthesia nurse, who comes from the Philippines, made contact with the mayor of the city of Bakolod on the island of Negros. He had already organized various missions on the island in the past and was looking for a team for another mission.
We arrived before New Year's Eve. Our team consisted of Dr. Klaus Exner and Dr. Bianca Baican as plastic surgeons, Dr. Susanne El-Sigai as hand surgeon, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Exner as orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Axel Fischer and Dr. Genia Kunits as anaesthetists, Aaron Warnke Marinay as anaesthesia nurse, Dorothee Köhler and Alexandra Backhaus as operating room nurses and Bernd Winters as social worker
Three locations were planned in the Philippines, where we spent three days each. This meant that we were able to offer our care to many patients. On the other hand, we always had to make long journeys in the evening to complete the post-operative rounds at the previous location.
On New Year's Eve, we were advised not to celebrate on the street, as the fireworks were usually produced illegally, had a fuse that was far too short and were often fired in a criss-cross pattern. We saw the extent of the injuries in hospital over the next few days. In the municipal hospital in Bakolod, there were many patients with serious hand injuries spread over several wards. Most of them were children between the ages of 6 and 16. So the team split up. Our hand surgeon Dr. El Sigai and Prof. Ulrich Exner stayed in Bakolod and spent three days treating the New Year's Eve injuries.
Dr. Exner and I drove back to the last hospital. On the day we left, a nurse had pulled us into a patient's room and introduced us to a little boy. He had been hit by a truck on the road 11 months ago and had suffered large skin defects on his thighs and back as a result. A skin graft was attempted, but this was unsuccessful due to a lack of sufficient instruments. Unfortunately, this resulted in an additional non-healing wound. Using the instruments we had brought with us, we were able to harvest a lot of skin, expand it and transplant it. We were able to remove the pressure bandages on the way to the airport after our operation at the third location and were able to see for ourselves that the skin had grown on well. As we learned later in an e-mail, the little boy was discharged just 2 weeks after the operation, after a stay of 11 months.
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