After spending two weeks working in a hospital in Ethiopia, Shannon Garner, a flight nurse with Benefis Mercy Flight, returned with a new appreciation of health care in America.
“It made me think we’re incredibly lucky to have such great resources,” Garner said.
At the hospital in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, emergency room patients had to take a number and wait for hours to be seen.
“The power would go out regularly,” Garner said. “It’s kind of spooky to have somebody on bypass and have the power go out.”
Garner volunteered in the east African country with a group out of Missoula organized through the Chain of Hope, a London-based charity for children with heart problems.
The eight-person team worked 15 to 20 hours a day to do 11 surgeries to repair heart valves during their two-week stay.
The majority of the patients were teenagers, although the youngest was 5 and the oldest was 34, Garner said.
Most of the children they treated had rheumatic fever, a complication of not receiving antibiotics for strep throat. The disease causes plaque to build on heart valves, causing the valves to fail.
Most of these children would die in their 20s without the surgery, Garner said.
“These kids were incredibly sick,” he said.
Many of them had two or three valves repaired or replaced.
Rheumatic fever is rare in the United States because most children are properly treated for strep throat, so the surgeries the team did in Ethiopia were semi-experimental. Most of the kids recovered very well and very quickly, Garner said.
“They would recover faster than anything I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Garner and his team, which included a surgeon, anesthesiologist, profusionist, scrub nurse and a general equipment manager nurse, spent their two weeks working in the Cardiac Center of Ethiopia, a new clinic located near Ethiopia’s university hospital.
The director of the Cardiac Center has worked for 30 years to establish it. He brings foreign teams of doctors and nurses to teach the staff at the center.
“The goal is to develop the country to become independent to take care of their own kids,” Garner said.
The center is well staffed, but performs surgeries only when a visiting group is there. Garner and his team will return to Ethiopia about once a year for the next few years to continue training the staff.
While they’re there, the visiting surgeon works to train Ethiopian surgeons and scrub nurses train nurses.
Garner specializes in intensive care and recovery and trained Ethiopian nurses on how to care for patients after surgery.
Garner and his group hope to start a foundation to collect donations to help with future trips to Ethiopia.
To donate, contact Stefne Tahta in Missoula at 406-360-3022.
