Clinic Day Stories: "Why Would Anyone Want To Marry Me?"

  Dien 
  Originally uploaded by interplast.

We awoke early for breakfast and were at the hospital by 7:00am. Patients were already lined up waiting for us. The local hospital employees were incredibly helpful, organizing the patients so that those who were seen last year and told to come back got to be screened first. The clinic was run very well and was not at all as chaotic as I had imagined it would be. Each patient was seen first by the two surgeons, Dr. Richard Siegel and Dr. Chris Connor, to see if their case was one that we could operate on. It is always tragic to turn a patient away, but some come with very minor problems or cosmetic issues that they want fixed. Many parents bring their children back after they’ve had a cleft palate repair because they can still see a very small hole in the roof of the child’s mouth. This hole is a perfectly normal thing to have after a palate repair, and as the child grows the tiny hole slowly closes up. The surgeons and translators explained this to the parents and these cases were sent home. One very sad case was a young woman with elephantitis of the hand (extremely swollen/oversize hand). Repairing this deformity requires very specialized surgery which unfortunately our surgeons are unable to perform. We will try to send a hand surgeon on the next trip to this site so that this patient can be treated.

We saw a huge number of ptosis cases, several burns, and a number of cleft lips/palates. As this is a very “mature” Interplast site (i.e. we have been here many times before) we are seeing a lot of kids who have had their cleft lip repaired but have returned for palate repair or revision of the lip or palate. One young woman in particular captured my heart…

Dien is 26 years old, although she is so small and youthful she looks like she is only about 15. When she was less than one month old she was burned in an accident. She was sleeping under a mosquito net when a strong wind blew through her house and knocked over a kerosene lantern. The mosquito net caught fire and fell in flames on top of Dien. She has a tremendously beautiful face despite the scars that she will always bear. Dien went to school until the 5th grade. Her family was very large and one of the children needed to drop out of school and start working to help support the family. Since Dien was not happy at school and had to suffer the ridicule of her classmates every day, she volunteered to give up her education to help her family. Now she is a farmer, and her little finger contracture on her right hand bothers her when she is working in the fields. The Interplast team will release this contracture for her, and hopefully ease some of this discomfort for her. When asked if she was married she responded, “No. I am so ugly why would anyone want to marry me?” It’s ironic, since her physical beauty had caught my eye from the beginning, and the more she smiled and talked the more enamored I was with her. It’s so tragic that she doesn’t think anyone sees her true beauty.

Comments

[replica celine handbags]

Dissertation writing for the Bachelor students is a very much difficult chore to do.

[cheap hanel handbag]

Very nice post. This topic is one that has been of great interest to me since I was just a kid.

[Mosquito nets India]

Many people attract towards physical beauty but wise and intelligent people seek for the good people with high moral value. When we get old, our physical beauty may change but good character never changes!