MAY-B-4

OPERATION SMILE VISIT

HOSTED BY BILL AND CATHY MAGEE,

AND ATTENDANCE AT THE PTP-2004

OF THE VARIOUS COUNTRIES REPRESENTED AT OPERATION SMILE’S REGIONAL PROGRAMS,

WHILE ESCORTED ON THE RUN BY THE NEW SOON-TO-BE-ANNOUNCED GWU FRESHMAN MEDICAL STUDENT ANTHONY CAPPOLINO

May 11—14, 2004

Operation Smile is a genuinely good organization filled with really good people!

I drove down through the traffic of I-95, which was a little bit dense around Richmond, but otherwise I made a rather uneventful trip into the Eastern Virginia area around Norfolk. I crossed the tunnel after seeing the US Navy carrier fleet based at Norfolk with a large flotilla around it, presumably as a security cordon around it. I had come down the Eastern Shore once with both Michael and Donald and had taken the Bay Bridge Tunnel from the Delmarva Peninsula under the outlet of the Chesapeake and had visited the John King family in Norfolk, where Donald could have the thrill of driving the MG in the driveway that john King and his wife had there. They were former Peace Corps volunteers. It was a long time ago, since I believe Donald was about ten. I was remembering this era since I believe that is the last time I had made the “Great Circle Route” around the Chesapeake that I had launched just now after leaving my sisters and Doug at the A/C entrance of the Holocaust Museum. I pondered that the Chesapeake may look like a lake, but that the Great Circle is around 650 miles, as I recall, and back then gasoline that took me around was probably all of 30 cents per gallon. It was during this trip opf mine that it pushed past $2.00 per gallon, up over sixty cents since Christmas, and that before the Memorial Day that marks the start of the peak driving times of the year. We had canoed on the river at the Norfolk wetlands, at that time having also canoed on the Wicomico at the highest cypress swamp in America earlier, where Donald and Michael had also fished. I remembered all this since it has been along time since we have engaged in any of that kind of activity. And soon, another grandchild will be born in Gainesville, which may make it less, rather than more, likely that we can see them up at the newly settled Derwood house and its new Grandkids room, which has been the first place I have slept in the refurbished house.

ARRIVAL AT PARTY TIME

AT CHEZ MAGEE ON THE WATERFRONT,

AS 52 FOREIGN PHYSICIANS COME FOR PTP TRAINING,

AND 3 SPECIAL WORLD CARE KIDS COME FOR OPERATION

I arrived three and a half hours after my 3:30 PM launch, just in time to party! A good group had gathered, 52 of them being physicians among the 60 invited to participate in the PTP (“Physicians’ Training Program”) at EVMS, Eastern Virginia Medical School where Bill Magee and his senior partner Horton had practiced. The group was all mixing according to a careful plan, since they had arrived as strangers and now they would become friends, oiled up by the bucket of Manhattans that has been a tradition since it was initiated by the Magee parents when they were alive, and then going on to a standard sequence of dances for the participation of everyone—the MD’s and even the eleven year old patient brought here with their grotesque facial deformities to be worked up this week and operated next week. The sequence starts with the very participatory “YMCA” dance and then moves into the Macarena in honor of the Latinas present who can strut their stuff and vamp to their hearts’ content. They are in full flower with one especially who is hard to look at and take seriously at the same time, since she is prancing like a Madonna and is quite aware of here drop dead gorgeous looks—and she has become a cosmetic surgeon specialist in Columbia!

I met Anthony Copollino whom I had met on his interview date as an applicant to GWU medical school, after running the missions department of Operation Smile in its huge warehouse for the past many years. He is an ideal candidate for medical school particularly of the GWU type, since he has already had a life and has shown his interest in helping the less advantaged. But, as is the case with almost all of my student and advisees he is kept on tenterhooks, on the alternate list and sitting by the phone awaiting the call to announce that he has been accepted into his dream, and can now start the medical school part of his dream, since he has been involved with operation Smile since high school. It is now a 13 million dollar a year organization and has about sixty employees with chapters in a score of countries. The trainees that will meet here over the next two weeks are the core of the groups that will continue on the work in each nation. The critical people are a few of the pediatric anesthesiologist and a few plastic surgeons, since they have adopted the policy that there should be no other standard than perfection for the care of any child anywhere. So they have to ship all their first class protective equipment as well as a lot of disposables by air freight on their typical mission which will cost up to 150,000 to care for up to 150 kids. I am here to help organize their first substantial foray into sub-Sahara Africa, and they are responding to my invitation to them to come to Somaliland and Ethiopia in a combined effort in the Horn of Africa. They have a couple of Kenyans who are going to be helpful in this regard, but they have worked in the Philippines, Far East, and South America largely. Bill is a UMD DDS and a GWU MD—as is his son Billy, my advisee; his son Trevor is graduating from GWUMC on Sunday when we will get together again at GWU. He was commencement speaker three years ago. At medical school graduation which I will host him for again if it turns out that we will all be together in the future.

It was a good party. I got to know Ahti, a pretty Iraqi born and London raised woman whose father is a business man who wants to start up a clinic in Iraq, and she is the escort of Emir the 11-year-old Iraqi girl whose father is trying to get a visa to come for the operation next Wednesday—which is a problem for him to get a visa although Ahti has power of attorney. It will be a big ordeal since she needs about 18hours of operating for this the first stage since she has no forehead and will need to have her encephalocoele corrected and her eyes brought back to the front of her head and a new nose corrected. She has a severe case of hypertelorism, and is going to need to be staged. But with all the evil going on between the two countries, this is a source of great pride and sympathy that this little girl represents. She is also getting the latest of all the technology, including the MRI scan with computer modeling and projection of how to spatially rearrange her head to create for her a face. That is also the case with the little boy from Venezuela and the other child from Morocco, each of whom are brought here for the extensive combined neurosurgical craniofacial operations that will rearrange their faces—as I was once involved with Dr. Joseph Murray at Boston Children’s Hospital (who went on to win the Nobel Prize for transplantation) and Mutaz Habal, my fellow BCHMC resident who joined as coauthors in the paper on major craniofacial surgical correction at about the time the French surgeon Tessier was doing so as well and came to visit the Magees at Norfolk. Mutaz went on to become the editor of the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, and Joe Murray has written me a recent letter inquiring after the well being of his advisee.

I was guest of the Magees in their spacious home crammed with the souvenirs of a large mob of kids (“Thriving on Chaos”) is what their photo collage showed. They also have souvenirs and gifts from all around the world in all places they have conducted missions over the years with Op Smile which has become about the fifteenth largest private health care foundation on earth, with a collection of spokespersons and stars advocates. These included Dana Romy (?) from “Touched by an Angel” (you can tell I don’t watch much!) and even Donald Trump’s last episode of the Apprentice put out an appeal for contributors to give $240 five years in a row—and all across America people are doing just that. I rather liked the spirit of the workers like Anthony, and a number of bright young people working in the organization, and I am also glad that Anthony is making plans to be moving on, as many should to get a life of their own well founded, now that their interest in helping others was proven by their work here. I am going to support the organization and perhaps help lead them into a larger role in Africa.

I went in to the conferences each morning and heard the country reports and the kinds of activities each were doing. I also saw the demonstrations and the basic discussions on cleft lips and palates. I had dinner with the Magees and a Chinese film crew that had come back from the Shanghai where they were as I was in Taiwan, and also talked with the Latinos about the familiarity I had with many of their nations. I went out for a run with Anthony along the river fronts and had dinner with Bill and Cathy in Franco’s their favorite pasta place. I also attended their cadaver session where each could raise flaps they had never done before in a training lab. I promised them a series of things I had thought appropriate—like the article I had coauthored with Joe Murray and Mutaz Habal, and autographed a copy of Out of Assa: Heart of the Congo. I will get all of these to them as they come up to assist their son Trevor in his graduation and as they visit their grandkids here. Billy is still in Stanford, just now finishing his general surgery this next month and starting his plastic surgery training in July 1 to follow in his Dad’s footsteps. Cathy is the one who seems to be able to pull all this together, and I met her sister who is active in funning a New York part of the Foundation and I heard that Richard DeVos Jr. is the Grand Rapids chapter chairman. We had sat at the picnic table along the waterfront and talked about how wonderful it might be just to stay home since the setting is so wonderful—and I told them about the Derwood idyll I had just left as well. We reminisced about many of the people that were at GWU as he was leaving as I was arriving. We have a lot of common ground.

They are leaving for Washington, and will continue on to New York after the commencement celebration. I will be leaving Norfolk for the Eastern Shore and then rendezvous on the platform at GWU. But, more importantly, we will certainly join in aboard with the combined help of people in places as foreign sounding as Ethiopia and Somaliland, for which I had furnished a slide show on the computer and a print photo album tour on the people we had saved up for them to fix later for which I have forwarded the promissory note.

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