IN MY WORDS

A First for UMDNJ

On Friday, February 4, our UMDNJ team of 15 departed Newark Airport and headed to Guayaquil, Ecuador, about 3,000 miles away. An exotic travel destination for some, this was no winter vacation for our group. We had planned this trip for a year to do cleft lip and palate surgery on local children. About 30 percent of the population of Ecuador lives in poverty, and cannot afford procedures we consider routine. In the U.S., cleft lips are usually repaired when a child is 10 weeks, cleft palates at nine to 18 months. In Ecuador the children are older, making the surgery more difficult; but these repairs can make the difference between a normal life and one lived as an outcast with a disability. We arrived on Saturday, screened 70 children ages 10 weeks to 12 years on Sunday, and did 25 cleft lip and palate surgeries on Monday through Thursday, a heavy surgical load. I have participated in several of these "Healing the Children" journeys, and decided it was the right time to organize a UMDNJ team. Besides the obvious health and psychological benefits for the children and their families, I hope this will instill in our residents a desire to do charitable work because I think this is an important part of being a physician. Perhaps this will inspire some of them to create their own such trip, or to do volunteer work in their communities. My hope is that our UMDNJ trip will be an annual event.

Participants: Vincent Ziccardi, DDS, MD, chair of oral and maxillofacial surgery at NJDS; Tom Schiebele, MD, director of pediatric anesthesiology at UMDNJ-University Hospital (UH); Maria Diaz-Vega, anesthesia tech at UH; Fran Devonshire, RN, oral surgery nurse at NJDS; Gilbert Chang, MD, a pediatrician who completed his pediatric residency at UH and is a 1996 alum of UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; two residents from anesthesiology and three from oral and maxillofacial surgery; Lynn Speer, RN, an ER nurse from Columbia Presbyterian, and Nicea D'Annunzio, Esq, a lawyer in private practice. Financial support for the trip was provided by NJDS, the New Jersey Society of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons and private donations. Supplies and instruments were donated by Ethicon, KLS Martin, Porex Surgical Products Group and Synthes Maxillofacial.