The thing about this trip....

There are so many reasons that Team Heart is such a success: the coordinators, the personnel, the country of Rwanda and its people, and best of all, the patients. I think if you asked any return volunteers this year why they do this, most likely their answer would be the patients. An example of this occurred today, Friday, early in the afternoon. There is a patient here who has wiggled his way into all of our hearts. He is from an orphanage in Kigali and was brought to us by his teacher, so we aren't the only ones under his spell. Maybe it's his eyes and the way he watches, the hopeful arch to his brow, his eager friendship with the patients already in stepdown. Surely his bright, beautiful smile, flashed on demand, coupled with his willingness to undergo any test we throw at him both play a part as well. Because this young man is sick, any way you look at it. His right heart is huge. He has an abnormal tricuspid valve that resembles a hose, and a huge foramen ovale, all increasing the workload of his heart. His apical pulse is visible from across the room and without surgical intervention his future will surely be cut short.

In order to determine if he is a viable candidate for surgery he has undergone oodles of tests to give us the information we need. Finally today we inserted a pulmonary artery catheter under ultrasound guidance in the hopes that we could finally discover the pressures in his right heart and pulmonary artery and thus whether we can do surgery or not. This young man has found advocates in every corner of this team, in anesthesia, in surgeons, our cardiologists, and our nurses. As the team worked together to procure this vital information, the discovery of his pulmonary artery pressures being within a normal range elicited surprised gasps from all present. His surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Though just getting him into surgery is a win, the next steps will not occur without risk. But he is literally in the best hands possible and no matter what happens, we're all pulling for this one.