samson's hope

My heart sank when Caleb, a translator, stopped me on the stairs and handed me a well-worn packet of papers. The first was a discharge form, neatly printed with information about the surgery we did last year. I lifted it to see the scrawled report, detailing just how Dr. Gary had sliced into the right side of his jaw and lifted out the grapefruit-sized tumor growing there. How much blood he had lost. How many screws it took to fasten the metal plate that would serve as a jaw. And down at the bottom, I read the words I was dreading. Will need ICBG sometime after three months.

ICBG stands for iliac crest bone graft, basically a fancy medicalese way of saying that we can't just leave a metal plate sitting in someone's face. That eventually the body will reject that foreign object, pushing the metal out through the skin. So, instead of leaving patients to that fate, we come back once they've healed from the first surgery and take chips of bone from one of their hips, the iliac crest. We re-open the jaw and place those chips all along the metal plate, and after a few months, the body grows fresh bone from those little pieces and everything is all right again.

The problem with all of this is that Samson, the man looking at me with hope spilling from his eyes, was carrying a card with tomorrow's date on it. And there are no surgeons here who can do that sort of a surgery tomorrow. There should have been one, but he wasn't able to stay for as long as he thought he would and so Samson, as far as I knew, was going to have to go back to Benin and hope that the thin layer of skin covering his plate would be enough to hold until we pass this way again. Only I knew it wasn't; I could feel the ridges in the metal when I ran my fingers across his jaw, and I prayed there was something we could do.

I left him sitting under the tent in the warm, evening air and ran back up the gangway and down the two flights of stairs to the hospital, carrying Samson's hope in my hands, dreading the thought of going back outside to tell him no.

I didn't have to.

It turns out that the maxillo-facial surgeon coming this weekend is also one who can perform ICBGs. I flipped through the big book in the OR office where all the surgeries are scheduled, and found Samson's name almost immediately. It was the first one on Monday morning's list: Samson. Thirty-five years old. ICBG. A second chance.

When I reached the top of the gangway again, I waved my arms to catch the attention of the little group huddled on the bench, Samson, his wife and Caleb, the translator. They looked up at me, expectant, and I grinned and threw both my thumbs triumphantly in the air.

They didn't hesitate for a second. Just got up and started moving towards the ship, quickly, like I might change my mind if they walked too slowly. We paused at the top of the stairs to check them in and I led the little procession through the hall to B Ward. Samson's smile was wide as he looked at the familiar hospital where last year his healing had begun.

On Monday, our hope is that that healing will be completed.