Israeli Doctors Perform Surgeries on Children in Peru - Part 1

Without taking advantage of any public or national resources,  Dr. Eyal Winkler, a plastic surgery specialist, leaves his daily life in Israel behind every year, and arrives with a team of doctors, to perform surgeries on children in third world countries, where the local medicine cannot provide their needs. Mostly these are children who suffer from burns and cleft lips. Doron Cooperstein of Ynet has joined the Israeli delegation and accompanies the events with a life journal from the field.

In the course of the last 20 years, Dr. Eyal Winkler, Director of Plastic Surgery Dept. at the Sheba Medical Center - Tel Hashomer Hospital, former chair of the Association of Plastic Surgeons and the proprietor of a very successful plastic surgery clinic in Ramat Aviv, leaves behind his professional and private life for 10 days, almost every year he travels to the far corners of the world to operate on children in third world countries.

He does not represent anyone, nobody sends him, and no governmental body finances these charity trips. He recruits 3 or 4 senior surgeons from his own department to join him and finances these trips through rounds between his own wealthy local contacts. When the financing falls short, he opens his own wallet and pays the rest.

Throughout the years, Dr. Winkler headed 15 humanitarian delegations on which he operated on children in places like Vietnam, Nepal and Congo, however, the country he most attached to, is Peru. The gates to Peru were opened 10 years ago by the former Peruvian president, Alejandro Toledo, which was known for his affinity to Israel and the Jewish people. Through the insistence of his Jewish wife Elian, Toledo has become a close personal friend and the host of the doctors from Israel who came to help.

The most required surgery of these charity trips is repair of cleft lip and palate, which is a common problem in third world countries where mixed marriages are common. However, as the specialty of Dr. Winkler and his Sheba department is burns, it turns out to be that many of his prospective patients are children with bad burns; most of them could not be helped by the local surgeons.

We meet two of these children this morning, less than 24 hours after arriving in Cusco, Peru, after traveling for over 30 hours on 3 connecting flights. The Cusco Central Hospital has the look of a deserted army camp form the days of the British mandate in Israel. However, this is just the outside, on the inside a wave of stench welcomes you with nauseating mix of harsh cleaning solvents and extra cheap hospital food (this is really awful food and in no way can be compared to hospital food in Israel).

The plaster from the blue-painted, turn of the 20th century style, walls is peeling off, the bare concrete floor is black with grit and dirt, and in the operating room, where it should be particularly sterile, a cleaning worker with a rubber hose passes by and rinses the floor with a strong stream of water.

We are on our way to the burn unit of the hospital to meet the first two candidates for surgery, children who are about 4 or 5 with bad burns over more than 50% of their bodies. The first one we meet has bad burns on his legs, so bad that he has trouble walking, and uses a cart to move around. His legs are mangled and his gait is twisted due to the burning pains and scarring. His very burned face carry an assortment of scars and patches of rough skin that are the remnants of previous failed skin grafts.

Dr. Winkler closely inspects the face of the terrified child. Every touch on the red and scarred skin brings out screams and heart wrenching cries. He was hospitalized 5 months ago, and received no treatment that might have improved his condition.

"In Israel a patient like that leaves the hospital after a week" says Winkler, and adds, "I can help him and improve his condition, we can make him walk again".

I ask about his face, "we will fix his face", he declares, we will peel off all the scarred skin. We brought some special equipment from Israel".

The condition of the second child is slightly better, but only slightly. Here too we hear the heart wrenching cries. Badly burned in the lower part of his body, including lower abdomen, the 4 year old child was hardly treated at all, due to an unfortunate combination of lack of knowledge and lack of suitable equipment. "One should know where to be born", I tell Winkler on the way out, "One should know where to be burned", he throws back at me.

We go down to the operating room, supposedly this is the most sterile room in the hospital. However, Peru's interpretation of sterile is different from what we are familiar with in the Western hemisphere. The room is equipped with some old equipment from the 1970's or earlier, the floor is filthy, the windows have been gathering dust for a while now, and even the hospital sheet spread over the surgery bed had known much better days.

Now we meet the chief nurse of surgery. She is the authority here and the last word here is hers. Orit Polak, the daughter of a local businessman who runs a chain of oncology clinics, translates and acts as the liaison between the Israeli team and the hospital personnel who speak no English at all.

Most of the modern equipment was brought into the hospital by Winkler and his people in their luggage. They only need the very basics to be provided by this hospital, however, this too might pose a problem. A simple cast kit, an essential item after performing a skin graft, is nowhere to be found in this hospital. They make a shopping list and hand it to the nurse, hopefully, by tomorrow the much needed cast kit will be waiting for the doctors in the operating room. Otherwise, this will not happen.