Truly amazing dedication and compassion

Just once in a while, a great while, you come across something that affects you so deeply that you never, ever forget it. I thought of one just the other day, and it had me filling up with emotion just remembering it. Just like it does every time I think of it. Never fails.

I read it in Reader’s Digest

This happened a long time ago, I think I was still a teenager at the time. I used to buy old copies of the Reader’s Digest from a charity shop and go through them, finding interesting articles and all kinds of odds and ends. I don’t even know if it’s still published, but it used to have condensed versions of currently popular books, pages of jokes, pages of unusual or commonly mistaken words, and of course interesting articles on all kinds of subjects.

For someone like me, who read a hell of a lot at the time, and had an insatiable curiosity about virtually everything, it was a goldmine. I used to eat it up with a spoon, as either Butch or Sundance said in the film.

The particular article I remembered just the other day was about a medical unit, comprised solely of volunteers, that travelled to foreign parts and did countless operations for free. They used to land in a country (by ship, if I recall), and go to work. They would set up makeshift operating theatres and several doctors would be almost immediately examining the locals and triaging them for surgery. The examinations and setting up the theatres could take a day or two, and from then on, for a week or two, it would be just one operation after another, very much like a conveyor belt system.

The conveyor belt of compassion

One group of medics would be working in a theatre and doing nothing but corrective eye surgery, one after another, while another group focused on removing tumours and growths, and yet another would be working on fixing broken or dislocated limbs. There were probably about three or four other things that became the focus of other groups, but I can’t recall what they were.

This one particular group was working on doing corrective surgery for cleft lip and palate. This condition not only takes away the child’s natural beauty, it can also make it difficult for the child to feed properly or to speak properly. It can be a truly disfiguring condition, and one that can change the course of a child’s life for ever. 

With modern surgical techniques these conditions can be corrected without too much fuss these days, but in undeveloped countries with no recourse to surgery children with these deformities generally carry them for life. So this group of medics, (doctors, nurses, surgeons, anaesthetists, etc), were all focused on this one form of surgery. And to relieve the tension they would do their best to have a laugh and a joke as they went about their business – no point in making things more solemn than necessary, specially when the patients were, very often, children and their parents were onlookers. And so this group had it down to a fine art – they could manage to perform amazing and life-changing surgery and at the same time keep their own spirits up, and those of the parents.

One doctor was routinely stony faced

One surgeon though was known to be unusually withdrawn. He’d managed to get a reputation for being pretty miserable and downbeat, no matter what was going on around him. The others thought of him as a poker-faced individual, who showed no emotion or engagement, no matter what the situation, and he was generally given a wide berth by the others.

Day after day the group were changing lives, transforming disfigured children into normal looking kids who could laugh and smile, and whose parents could finally see them as nature intended, for the first time in their lives. And the medics loved it, knowing they were making a real difference. They were getting a totally different level of job satisfaction than they did at home, although they might have been performing much the same operations, in many cases. They really loved to know they were helping these people who had no access to any real medical aid for ninety-five percent of the time, let alone modern surgery. The only one who never seemed to show any appreciation of what they were doing was this sullen surgeon. And needless to say, the others were finding it hard to work with him.

One little girl didn’t make it

One day he was performing corrective surgery on a very young child, I think it was a girl of just two or three years old. She had a cleft lip and palate and the parents had never seen her smile properly, not even once. He did everything he could, but the unthinkable happened and the child died on the operating table. The body was taken to one side and the team moved on quickly to the next patient. It was a conveyor belt that never stopped.

At the end of the shift the doctors and nurses all retired to their quarters for a well earned drink, and to unwind. A little while into the r’n’r period, one of the nurses went over to the makeshift operating theatres because, well I suppose she’d left something there, probably her cigarettes or lighter, this being long before such things were so harshly looked down on. As she walked into this particular theatre, lit only by the light of a paraffin lamp, she saw there was a doctor still operating. She couldn’t understand it – they’d all quit for the day and were pretty much exhausted, and then to top it all, it transpired that it was the sullen, mirthless doctor, the one they all thought of as a dull and miserable soul.

She approached closer and asked why he was still working, and working alone too. As he spoke to her she was surprised, even shocked, to see that he was very carefully and methodically operating on the face of the child who’d died on the operating table earlier that day. He quietly said he was just finishing his work. But the child died, the nurse said to him. What’s the point, there’s nothing you can do for her now. Save it for all the other kids, we’ve got a busy day tomorrow.

For the sake of the little girl’s mother

Quietly, almost reverently, the doctor explained that the child’s mother had never in her life been able to see her little daughter looking normal, or smiling properly, not even one time. I just want to make sure she gets to see the little girl, just once, looking beautiful and perfect, when she sees her lying in her little coffin.

As the nurse watched him gently and carefully stitching the little girl’s face in such a way that she was gradually approaching the perfection her mother must have so longed for, she found she was sobbing. This apparently soulless doctor had stayed behind to operate on a dead child for no other reason than to make sure her mother could see her looking absolutely perfect … just once.

I don’t know about you, but this affects me deeply for some reason. It did when I first read it, and it always has, any time I’ve thought about it since. This is just such an amazing example of someone caring so deeply for a child, and for her mother, that he would operate on the child’s body after death. And do it knowing that no-one, no-one but that mother, would even know he’d done it. To me that represented such a selfless act of compassion that I find it hard to think about, let alone write about, without choking back tears.

Selfless compassion … and never a word spoken about it

I know there are teams of medics like that today, just the same as there were then, and they do amazing work. The disaster zones and battle grounds might change, but the need for such work goes on regardless. Anyone with a few million to spare could do a lot worse than fund a few more trips for them. But how many individuals among them, do you suppose, would ever even think of doing what that doctor did? And perhaps he’d been doing it time and time again, whenever a child died, who knows? And without ever mentioning it to a living soul.

If there’s a more compassionate and selfless act, I don’t know what it might be. I can’t even begin to imagine.