Surgery and Healing in the Developing World - Dartmouth-Hitchcock

CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 6
To My Son, the Urologist
Douglas Walter Soderdahl and Douglas Wayne Soderdahl
6/20/99
Dear Doug,
Had an idea to bounce off you. What about making our chapter a dialogue in
the form of letters between father and son? That is, since you have not gone on a
short-term mission, but likely would want to consider doing so in the future, you
would have a number of queries of ‘experienced’ me. And so, the format would be:
“Dear Dad,
As I sit here with the remote control in one hand and a beer (root, of course) in
the other, I am thinking about helping out urologically in far-flung parts of God’s
green globe someday. Since you have ‘been there, done that’, I wonder if you could
kindly answer some of the questions that arise when these thoughts come up. Like,
what’s it really like? What could I expect to do? Is traveling difficult? What about
language? Tell me what operating rooms are like? Are there any similarities to
what we have in Urology here in the States and ‘over there’?”
I think you get the drift. The queries, literally, are endless. You would help me as
someone who has not done this, and probably would have questions that I wouldn’t
even think would arise owing to the familiarity of experience, for the most part a
pilgrimage of many trials and many errors. You would be the prototypical surgeon
in practice Stateside. The thrust of the book is to inform and to challenge folks like
you to consider volunteering overseas. Let me know what you think.
Love, Dad
6/29/99
Dad,
That sounds like an excellent idea. Just about everyone I speak with says that
they would love to do something like that, but they just don’t know where to start.
I can think of numerous questions that can be addressed for the chapter.
• How do you set it up?
• What to bring?
• What to read?
• How do I deal with problems outside my specialty?
• Will industry support me with equipment? How do I get it?
• Are there any tricks performing urologic surgery with inadequate resources
and support?
Surgery and Healing in the Developing World, edited by Glenn Geelhoed.