2022 Year in Review, Part I

As I sit down to write my first ever blog post, I am feeling reflective and thankful. The year 2022 was unlike any other for me. I left behind comfort and familiarity to take a leap of faith for an internal calling that was planted a decade prior. I expanded my travel, leadership, and cultural awareness skills. I learned to embrace simplicity, vulnerability, and growth. From a professional standpoint, it was one of the most challenging years I can recall. From a personal standpoint, it was the most rewarding. Please join me as a take a look back on 2022.

The year started with me selling my car, packing up my apartment, attending "bon voyage" parties at work, hugging my family and friends goodbye, and hopping on a one-way trans-Atlantic flight. I had done most of these things before in a different context, but what made this unique was what was waiting when I touched down at my final destination: Tenerife, Canary Islands.

Just a few months prior, I signed a contract to serve as a volunteer with Mercy Ships. (More about my reasons for wanting to serve with Mercy Ships in a separate post.) I would be leading the hospital laboratory as the Senior Medical Laboratory Scientist for the entire 11 month field service in Senegal. Once arriving in Tenerife, I boarded my new home - a 3-berth shared cabin on the Africa Mercy hospital ship.

The weeks passed quickly, as I trained in my role, met the team I would work with in Senegal, installed new instrumentation, and organized the Laboratory. The ship previously provided free surgeries to patients in Senegal but had to abruptly leave in March 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. The Laboratory sat untouched the past two years while in port in the Canary Islands, so it was in quite disarray. But, as the team and I cleaned, uncovered the instruments, and restocked supplies to bring the Laboratory back to life, I grew with infectious enthusiasm of the ship returning to Senegal to fulfill a promise to finish what was started prior to the pandemic.

After a four day sail from Tenerife, the Africa Mercy arrived back in Dakar, Senegal on February 1, 2022. It was a day of celebration as the ship docked in port and began operations to re-open the hospital. For the Laboratory, this meant completely setting up all of the instruments, finalizing policies and protocols for the field service, recruiting and organizing crew for the blood donor database, and screening potential patients to confirm eligibility for surgery. Just before the operating rooms were sterilized for the field service, the hospital welcomed all of the crew on board to tour facilities. The kids loved seeing the instrumentation and learning about what we do in a clinical laboratory.

The first patients walked on board the Africa Mercy in late February. The field service started with surgeries focusing on Women's Health and Maxillofacial specialties. The Lab team quickly got into rhythm with testing procedures, schedules, and responding to the needs of our patients and crew.

When not working in the Laboratory, I spent time off ship exploring Dakar and the surrounding areas with crew members from all around the world that quickly became friends. There was a constant revolving door of new crew on board the ship, which made finding someone to chat with easy but saying goodbye always difficult.

As the patients continued to cycle through the hospital, the surgical blocks changed from Women's Health to Reconstructive Plastics to Pediatric Orthopedics. The Lab team performed testing for patients at the start of the screening process to determine candidacy for surgery, followed by surgical support while the patient was in the operating room and of course monitoring recovery and rehabilitation post-operation. I cheered each time a patient was discharged from our care, as I truly felt like an essential part of the clinical team that helped in the individual's life-changing surgery and recovery.

The first half of the field service concluded with the arrival of the newly built Global Mercy in Dakar, Senegal. It was a time of celebration and excitement as the new bigger "little sister" docked alongside us to offer training and educational courses to local healthcare professionals. I will share more about this event and what the second half of 2022 had in store in Part II of the Year in Review posted soon...

Thank you for reading! Check back shortly for the next post.