Corrective surgery changes lives

By Michael Zapf, DPM

In the last five days we operated on Claudia, Cindy, Wilson, Maria Elena, Stephen, Tomas, Mildred, two Scarlets and 30 other children and young Honduran adults who have club feet.

I am part of a Rotary-sponsored brigade, or mission, to Honduras, Central America. I am writing this article from our base of operations in Honduras: the Hotel Maya located in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

When I say "we" I mean the doctors who are expert at performing surgeries on club feet. I wish I could consider myself one of the true experts, but I am really a junior attending.

On this trip are half a dozen podiatrists who each have more than 20 years experience correcting these malformed feet. They are highly skilled in this exacting and delicate art of children’s foot surgery.

The doctors in our group come from across the country: Detroit, Oklahoma, San Francisco and San Diego. The senior doctors have been doing this surgery for 25 years with hundreds, if not thousands, of club feet already corrected.

It is magical to watch them take feet that are turned any which way and end up making them point forward.

Maria Elena, for example, had her feet turned so sideways that her heels actually pointed forward when she walked in shoes. She was born with two club feet that went untreated, though a simple surgery would have corrected the problem.

She is now in her early 20s and has spent her life tripping over her feet. In a three-hour surgery, using two teams of three doctors each, we turned her feet around.

After three months of casts and a couple months of rehabilitation, she will look 90 percent better. If she elects for another surgery next year, we can nearly return her feet to normal.

"Tegus," as Tegucigalpa is sometimes called, is a city of 1 million people. The population in Tegus is varied.

Some people here would be considered wealthy in any country. Many more, like the nurses at the hospital where we do our work, make about $300 a month and the doctors make about three times that.

Millions in this country make close to nothing; they make up the bulk of our patient load. Two years ago we visited a village in the hills above the city. There they have no electricity, cook with a wood fire, have dirt floors and their only modern convenience is outside water service for two hours twice a week.

The children go to school for about four hours a day for six or seven years, provided they are capable of walking to school.

This is where we come in; our patients cannot make this trip on their deformed feet.

The lucky Hondurans complete high school and learn a trade that allows them to live on the upper edges of poverty. Their $300 does not allow for much—no cars, houses and no meals out.

Despite these vast differences, some similarities exist.

Many of the patients have names like Scarlet, Steven, and Cindy that, to my parochial way of thinking, are more associated with the United States.

Perhaps they have been influenced by American television and movies, even though few families can afford these luxuries.

I was told by one doctor at the hospital that American names are popular, even if Hondurans do not know what the names mean. He said one of his patients whose family may have lived near the port named him Usnavy.

A Rotarians on this trip and one of our tiniest patients are both named Cindy and the two Cindys have bonded, despite the lack of a common language.

In Honduras our trip is sponsored and hosted by the Rotary Club of Tegucigalpa. Stateside the sponsors of this trip are the Rotary clubs of Agoura-Oak Park and mine, the Rotary Club of Westlake Village Sunrise.

If you would like to help this project, you can buy a car raffle ticket. We are selling 2005 raffle tickets on a 2005 Mercedes Benz C320 Luxury Sedan for $100 a ticket, the profits of which go to this project as well as other efforts, like Tsunami relief.

You can pick up a ticket at my office or at the Oaks Shopping Center where the car is on display in center court. Imagine that: you get to drive a Mercedes so that children can walk.

Dr. Michael Zapf is a podiatrist in private practice with offices in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks.