Illawarra Rotarian, District Governor Dianne North, from the Rotary Club of West Wollongong has just returned from Yangon in Myanmar where she was a Rotarian Observer on an Interplast Surgical Mission partly sponsored by the Rotary Clubs of the Illawarra.
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Interplast (which stands for International Plastic Surgeons) is a not-for-profit organisation that travels to developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region to perform surgery on patients who would otherwise have no access to this medical care.
In these communities people with any physical abnormalities are generally considered cursed. Children with physical abnormalities typically are not allowed to attend school. As adults people will not do business with them so they do not have jobs. They therefore live in poverty.
Interplast repairs bodies and rebuilds lives so that these patients become accepted in their communities and become useful, contributing members of their society. What sets Interplast apart from other organisations doing similar work is the training that they provide.
Not only do they do life-changing surgery today, but they leave a legacy for tomorrow. The doctors in Yangon Hospital have been trained to perform surgery on cleft lips and palates, burn scar contractures and do this very well, so this surgical team travelled to Myanmar to do much more complex facial surgery requiring microsurgery.
They performed surgeries on patients with such things as complex facial tumours, squamous cell carcinoma in the cheek, a motor vehicle accident victim who had severe facial disfigurement, a young woman who had her scalp torn off in a workplace accident, and a 51-day-old baby with a haemangioma (mass of blood vessels) the size of an orange growing from the right eyelid. These surgeries would be a challenge in our hospitals, let alone in an operating theatre in a developing country.
The surgical team comprised three plastic surgeons, all from Melbourne, two anaesthetists (one from Melbourne and one from Adelaide) a ward nurse and a theatre nurse (both from Melbourne). Most of the team had been to Yangon Hospital before so they all worked together well as a team. They had all taken annual leave to travel to Myanmar for this work.
Rotary District 9675 sponsored this surgical mission. The money was raised during District Governor Dianne and her husband, David's visits to the 60 clubs in the district, telling the clubs about Interplast.
For further information on either Interplast or Rotary please contact District Governor Dianne North on 0429 774 363 or email districtgovernor@rotarydistrict9675.org
