Originally published in the
Mississauga News, June 2004

By Rob Beintema

Dispatches from the Orient, part III

It's been a week now since the Smile China medical mission came to Lanzhou, China to perform free cleft lip and palate repairs on underprivileged children.

In remote areas of China, children born with cleft lip and palate deformities are often left untreated. Farm families can't afford the surgery necessary to repair this condition.

These children are condemned to a life of medical complications. Even worse, they are condemned to a life of shame and isolation as social outcasts. Most will never attend school, never get a job, and never get married or have a family. Many will be abandoned at birth.

But for every story of rejection and ridicule, there seems to be a balancing tale of compassion and hope.

Shi Ying

One of our visitors this week is a teenager named Shi Ying. Her name literally translates to 'marble' because, after being abandoned, she was found lying on a slab of marble. Shi Ying was one of the orphanage children who had a cleft palate repair two years ago when Dr. Wong was last here. She is now in school and, for obvious reasons, hopes to become a nurse. Along with several other children from the orphanage, she greets Dr. Wong with a big hug. She is shy and still a little self-conscious. But she has a great smile.

There are many similar stories because a simple corrective procedure does more than just correct a deformity. It brings a light of hope and a possibility of a normal life.

Maybe it's just a ray of hope in a country so heavily populated that 40,000 new cleft palate and lip conditions are born each and every year. But the Smile China medical mission, led by its founder Dr. Joseph Wong from Mississauga's Credit Valley Hospital, with an international team of facial plastic surgeons, has also passed on skills and techniques to local surgeons. And, in the end, surrounded by 44 smiling faces, this mission will seem much more than just a drop in the bucket.

Our stay is almost over.

"This is the Long March," says Dr. Wong, noting the list of up to 15 patients a day who rotate through the three operating rooms. Some of the operations take more than three hours and the stamina and concentration of the facial plastic surgeons is amazing. They take quick breaks while new patients are anaesthetized and then head back down the long dark hall to the operating rooms. The days stretch into evening.

They are in the swing of things now. Every once in a while, a fourth operating room comes available and the pace picks up. The surgeons are now in a comfortable rhythm with the nursing staff.

Dr. Sykes still sets the surgical speed record. Dr. Wong tackles a long and difficult operation on a teenager that has the other surgeons dropping in to watch. Dr. Toni Zhong circulates from surgeon to surgeon, helping with translation and benefiting from hands-on experience second-year residents only dream of. Dr. Tollefson and his operations room nurse are both learning a new language as he asks for instruments in Chinese and his nurse responds in English. Brenda Barnes and Cecilia Cheng, the two Credit Valley Hospital nurses, track from operating room to operating room, running for supplies, calming the patients, alternatively teaching and learning from the local staff. Norma Bandler, President of the Credit Valley Hospital Foundation and Kelly Mena, a child psychologist, check on patients and prepare parting gifts for the children.

Down the hall from the surgical department, the patient ward has a different feel now. The anxiety level is down. Most of the children have been operated on. I still try to be as unobtrusive as a big white guy in operating room scrubs can be, but when they see me, and move to get up or pose their children, I wave them back down and make shushing sounds. And after a while they stop reacting to my presence and I am finally allowed into the healing flow of parents and children, playing, eating, and sleeping together bathed in the warm afternoon sunlight. It's a montage of beautiful, touching scenes.

On the final day, the Smile China team moves through the wards one last time. The doctors grin and nod at the healed faces. The parents clutch and grab at arms, babbling thanks even though they know most of the doctors don't understand a word. They repeat their thanks over and over anyway. They can't help themselves.

There is giggling, hugging, and laughter as babies burst into wails at the strange faces of those who helped them.

I look for the girl in green. When we first came to this hospital, we passed through a gauntlet of parents and children who had not made it through the screening process. Dr. Wong stopped to speak to those families, to explain that they could only do so many operations in the time and space allotted by the hospital. But he assured them they would be looked after, maybe on a following mission or maybe by Smile China funding local doctors to perform free surgery.

One girl, dressed in green broke down at our entrance. She desperately pleaded her case, but because of her cleft palate, her speech was so nasal she could barely be understood. She was a farm girl who had started work when she was 12-years-old, so that she could save the two years-worth of wages needed for her cleft palate operation at age 20. But the procedure failed and now, five years later, she had been waiting in town since March for Smile China.

When the operations began, we would see her every day, wearing that same green shirt, sitting, watching and waiting by the operation room doors.

Her persistence paid off. Dr. Wong relented and added her to the final roster of operations.

When we entered her ward on that last day, she jumped up and hugged all the doctors. But especially Dr. Wong. Her gratefulness was so genuine, it seemed to visibly lift the weight of responsibility, the grind of organizing and politicking, the toll of long hours in surgery off the shoulders of Dr. Wong.

And, for just a moment, Dr. Joseph Wong had the biggest smile in China.

A few words from Dr. Joseph Wong...