VVF, and happy birthday to ME.

The people here have made my birthday quite special, despite the fact that I hardly know their names… I walked out of my room at 6am and bumped my head on the balloons and markered signs that the night shift nurses had taped to my doorframe, then the OR wall was decorated too, and tonight we’re going out for fried chicken. The downside: One of the doctors here informed me that “I had already been a doctor for a year when I turned 24 – you haven’t even STARTED med school yet!” and then came back later to add, “I just remembered, I got married when I was 24 too!” Thanks doc. Now I feel both unaccomplished AND single.

The best part of my day, however, was watching a discharge ceremony for a few of the VVF patients. I have no idea what VVF stands for, but basically when women give birth they sometimes have a tear in the urethra lining that results in constant urine leakage, and it can only be fixed by surgery; some of these women have had this problem for many years. There is a huge demand for VVFs here and a visiting surgeon has been doing three of them a day (meaning I’m extremely familiar with some nasty-looking and uncomfortably-named instruments). The patients stay on the ship to recover for 7-10 days. At the discharge ceremony, they gave each of the departing patients a new dress, and they were singing praise songs and dancing and clapping to the beat of the drums that someone had brought.

We heard a testimony from a former VVF patient from Liberia last night who had been pregnant during the Liberian civil war, and went into labor during an attack on her village back in 2001. Her sister delivered the baby under a bush with bullets flying by, and yanked so hard that she broke the baby’s neck, damaging the mother so severely that she spent the next few years bleeding constantly, among other problems. Her family had fled and left her behind, a beggar and essentially an untouchable because of her condition. Thankfully, she eventually encountered someone who knew about Mercy Ships, and she came in for a free VVF surgery. She’s now healthy and immensely grateful to the crew and to God, and she sang us a song, and yeah, I crie, again...

(Some logistics: If anybody wants to call me we apparently have a U.S. phone number, so if you can’t bear to go another day without hearing my voice, just call 954-538-4258, but not too late at night, it’s 5 hours ahead here.)