Right at the beginning of the year, we flew to Myanmar, where we formed the follow-up team in Ngapali for a mission by Dr. Schöneich, plastic surgeon, and Dr. Angelika Wagner, anesthetist. They are the section heads of the INTERPLAST Munich section and organize missions to Myanmar almost every year. For the first two days, we still operated together. On the very first day of our mission, an emergency was brought to us. A fisherman injured his arm and armpit with a boat propeller. The main supplying blood vessel of the arm was injured, so we were able to perform a vascular reconstruction and thereby save his arm.
Our team was very small this time and consisted of Dr. Klaus Exner and me, Dr. Bianca Baican, as plastic surgeons, Dr. Axel Fischer as anesthesiologist, and Nicole as surgical nurse.
Alongside the usual small and indeed very large tumors, and cleft lips and palates, we also saw many patients with clubfeet. Dr. Schöneich had developed a simple and effective technique to enable these children to walk „normally“ again. It involves a tendon transfer on the lower leg as well as a lengthening of the Achilles tendon without major surgical interventions on the bone, which would not have been feasible under these more or less sterile operating room conditions.
Our local helper is Oliver Esser, a German chef who lived in Thailand for a long time and then founded a small eco-hotel right on the Ngapali coast in Myanmar. For several years, he has been trying to improve the medical care in this region of Myanmar and organizes many missions of various medical specialties in the small district hospital.
Through posters, schools, and radio, he informs the local population about upcoming missions. The people in this region mostly make a living from rice farming or fishing and are therefore very poverty-stricken. Adequate medical care is only available in the country's large cities. Hardly anyone can afford a journey there.
Besides cleft lips, jaws and palates, and clubfeet, we treat many burn sequelae, as the population cooks over open fires on the street, causing the children's plastic clothing to catch fire at the cooking area.
Our mission was scheduled for 10 days, during which we operated on about 60 patients.
At the end of the mission, the patients thanked us for our work and gave us coconuts, bananas, hand-carved wooden figures, or straw hats.
