A Pediatric Heart Mission: The Dominican Republic [1]
(Click Image to View Entire Dominican Series)
Editor’s Note:
I want to thank Alfredo Lomeli, CST, an open heart surgical scrub technician from Lubbock, Texas, and volunteered his time to work on a pediatric mission to the Dominican Republic. The following is his photographic journal and narrative of the events and the great story that transpired.
Alfredo in the D R (Dominican Republic)
Click the above image to view his FB page…
A Volunteer Mission … (After the Storm)
I have known Alfredo for almost 5 years and have watched him grow as a person as well as into a very talented, kind-hearted, open-heart surgical technician.
We first talked about doing a volunteer mission about a year ago- a little after I started branching out with the ‘Surfers blog. He talked a lot with Lacey Todd, CST– who has also done tremendous work in the field of pediatric missions, and who also hails from the Lubbock, TX area.
So right before the mission, Alfredo decides to take a little side vacation to NYC, JUST IN TIME for hurricane Sandy to arrive!
So after the storm of the century, Alfredo finally made it out of New York city the following Friday, and caught a flight to get to the Dominican Republic the next Monday.
That impressed me. After ALL that, he still made it to the mission!
The following is the first of a 3 part series of his photo essay of the work he and many other volunteers accomplished to do 19 open heart operations in two weeks.
The Arrival and First Operations…
The 1st OP- and a great outcome !
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Alfredo is actually doing more work translating for the perfusionist- as the scrub tech is pretty skilled and doesn’t really need his help.
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Not sure what Fredo is doing here- obviously helping out perfusion- he titled this picture – “Good Save”. So now he is a perfusion assistant.
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Another Good Save 🙂
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The pic is a little blurry, but the Love & Care certainly isn’t.
To be continued …
