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Campo Grande, Brazil - Tom Moore, plastic surgeon: Djeirmerson is pleased with his new ear. All that remains to complete the reconstruction is to elevate the ear with a skin graft. This final stage is planned in September.
Campo Grande, Brazil - Tom Moore, plastic surgeon: Here is the ear lobe following the transfer.
Campo Grande, Brazil - Tom Moore, plastic surgeon: This is the rib graft after sculpting. The ear lobe will come next.
Campo Grande, Brazil - Tom Moore, plastic surgeon: Djeimerson's deformity marked for surgery.
Campo Grande, Brazil - Tom Moore, plastic surgeon: This is Djeimerson, an eight-year-old seen in Recife in October after the first stage of reconstruction. He was self-concious about his severe microtia deformity, and was very grateful that we could give him an ear that would mitigate the mockery he endures from other children.
Campo Grande, Brazil - Tom Moore, plastic surgeon: Third year resident Marcio Belini carving rib cartilage to reconstruct an ear for a patient who lost her ear in an accident. Other residents and students look on. Ear reconstruction is truly an art, and Marcio has earned awards for his skill as an artist.
Campo Grande, Brazil - Tom Moore, plastic surgeon: The residents and staff with me in the operating room. I am the one with the colorful hat. This is a wonderful group to work with. They are all eager to learn new techniques that can help them treat their patients.
These lovely volunteers are our Golden Girls. All of them are retired nurses, and they come in to make facepacks, which are sterilized sets of gauze, tubing, sponges, toothpicks, etc. The materials are donated by local nurses, and would otherwise be thrown away. One facepack is used by the surgeon per operation, and it has everything they need except for instruments. It is the one thing that we cannot buy off the shelf, accoding to our director of medical supply services, Jim Dirck. He estimates the facepacks cost about $12 a piece, so when The Golden Girls come in and bang out 200 of them as they did today, they are in effect donating $2400 worth of materials. We don't call them the Golden Girls for nothing!
And while they volunteer out of the goodness of their hearts, they have fun as well. As you can see, they are having a grand old time gossipping, hanging out and trying to set up certain videographers with their granddaughters. Whenever they come they brighten up our day here at the office, hopefully they'll brighten up yours too.
