Uganda Spine Surgery Mission 2016 Team One: Day 12

​Dr. St. Clair and his team arrived in the wee hours of the morning. They barely had time to shower before the bus arrived to take us to the hospital.
 
We started the day with a bang when Lance (our new device rep team member that just arrived this morning) plugged a broken suction device into one of the wall outlets in the OR. A loud explosion/fireball ensued and the power to the OR immediately went out. Lance also had a black hand to show for it. The power was eventually restored and we were off to the races.

​The team was very happy to have Lance on board. The night before his arrival we were without a device rep, and after a long day of surgery, we spent an hour in the “cleaning room” (a.k.a. the “sluce”) washing, repackaging and wrapping all of the surgical instruments for the next day. Brian had been a pro at this, and he never complained a bit, but after taking on the job ourselves for once, we saw how awful it could be. The question on everyone’s mind that night was, “When is Lance going to get here?” We were all very happy to see his face this morning.
 
Our first case was a young man who had been in a boda boda accident (apparently a person in Uganda is injured every 3 minutes by a boda boda). He presented to an outside facility with paraplegia after the accident, but not transferred to our Emergency Room until several days later. His imaging revealed a T4 vertebral body fracture with retropulsion of bone into the spinal cord.

​We decompressed his spinal cord over the area of injury and instrumented his spine into position to restore stability. Sadly, his prognosis for recovery of lower limb function is poor given the time delay between the accident and his presentation to our hospital.
 
Our second case of the day was a young man with chronic back pain and degeneration/malalignment of several vertebral bodies in his lower back. We instrumented his spine into better alignment and restored normal disc height with an interbody graft.
 
That evening, the whole team got together at a restaurant nearby to have a nice dinner and get to know the new team. 

Lance (device rep, left) and Bogden (neuromonitoring, a.k.a. “Boggy”, right)

Jordan (senior college student from TCU), Lorna (scrub technician) and Susan (anesthesiologist).

Left to right: Michelle (physiotherapist), Megan (scrub technician), Dr. St. Clair, Jordan and Stanley