Three nurses from the NCH team worked wonders as they represented our community on a recent medical missionary trip to the Dominican Republic. They helped provide surgeries to several people who otherwise couldn’t afford needed medical care, including two children. Julie Lee, a clinical-support resource nurse and member of the NCH Medical Diplomats Council team, was joined by Anthony Silva and Stephany Scott, two other surgical-support nurses from NCH. They traveled with a group from Global Surgical Volunteers, a nonprofit organization that says it’s donated more than $4.3 million in surgical procedures, medical equipment, community building, food distribution and education to the needy.
“It’s always been a dream of mine to do this, but I thought it was far-fetched for me, raising two boys,” explains Lee. “Every time I heard a story from someone who’d done this, I thought I just have to make it happen. It was a year of planning and financial preparation, but now, I really want to get the word out that it’s possible and it’s fulfilling, so other staff can go and our community can know that our heart is in our work to help people here at NCH.”
Lee says she was “floating on cloud nine” every time she thought of going. She literally got her house in order and found someone to stay with her 13-year-old son. She worked with the head of Global Surgical Volunteers, Riky “Andy” Garcia, a certified surgical technician originally from the Dominican Republic, to organize this particular trip. She recruited Silva and Scott, since she knew they would be just as passionate about the medical-missionary work.
The charity assessed the needs in the visited community and scheduled more than a dozen surgeries for various people, including several with hernias and two with lipomas (non-cancerous tumors) that otherwise would have kept growing. One of the two children receiving procedures had an undescended testicle that was almost all the way up to his belly button. He had been suffering for a long time, and his mother was so relieved his life will be permanently changed.
The NCH nurses were joined at El Bueno Samaritano in La Romana, Dominican Republic, by a general surgeon from Cape Coral, an anesthesiologist from Michigan, a pediatric surgeon from Las Vegas, and others. As a clinical-support resource nurse, Lee rounds here at NCH all night long, supporting nursing practices and serving as a resource for all levels of staff wherever she’s needed. She hopes this helps others realize how lucky we are, that we can get great medical care here in Southwest Florida. NCH even donated some supplies for the trip, mostly medical gowns, sterile gloves and drapes that were all used to assist with the surgeries.
