Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — April 7-18, 2010
By Ginger H. Robinson, BSN, RN, President

Our team returned just before midnight on April 18 from our surgical teams' collective twenty-first trip to Vietnam. We departed on April 7 and arrived in Ho Chi Minh Ctiy on April 9. On April 10 we screened a combination of about 50 patients at the Odontomaxillofacial Hospital (OMFH), District 1 (Saigon District) and the National Hospital of Odontostomatology NHOS), District 5 (Chinese or Cholon District.)

Our team and the Vietnamese associates, including Dr. Le Thi Viet, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Department Director at the OMFH and Dr. Lam Hoai Phuong, Hospital Director at the NHOS, performed 30 free facial surgeries on April 12-16. The cases at the OMFH on April 12-13 included:

• 23 pediatric cleft lip and/or palate closures,
• one adult cleft lip closure,
• one case involving release of an ankylosis ("frozen" temporomandibular [TMJ] jaw joint), and
• a pediatric chin tumor removal.

TOTAL: 26

On April 14-15 the team did four surgeries at the NHOS. These cases involved:

• a tennis-ball sized tumor removal from a ten year-old boy's cheek (growing for two years),
• mandibular reconstruction on a young woman,
• placement of a rib graft and titanium bone plate on half of a mandible (lower jaw) of a young woman who had a tumor removed previously, and
• reconstruction of the frontal bone, zygomatic arch (near the eye), and ethmoid sinus (nasal area) for severe facial fractures of a young male motorcycle accident victim.

TOTAL: 4

On April 16 Randolph (Randy) Robinson, MD, DDS, Craniomaxillofacial Surgeon and Face the Challenge (FTC) Founder, presented at the 5th Facial Surgery Seminar FTC has given in Vietnam. The topics selected at the Vietnamese surgeons' request had to do with bone lengthening techniques, nasal surgeries, tumor diagnosis, removal, and reconstruction, and pediatric trauma. This seminar was attended by 50+ surgeons, anesthesia specialists, and nurses from the area.

We are relieved and grateful for the successful, uncomplicated surgeries, despite the complexity of some of the tumor removals and reconstructions. We were touched by the love demonstrated and the tears shed by the parents, siblings, and orphanage workers as they waited quietly in the 100 degree heat for their children's surgeries to be completed. There was a 44+ year-old farmer named Suc, or "cleft" in Vietnamese, who had his unrepaired cleft lip closed and he could return proudly to his wife of two years. The man whose TMJ was fused for three years with his partial denture stuck in his mouth and surgically released on April 13 was so happy, able to speak, chew, and wash his denture once again. And the extended family of a 10-year-old boy who had the tumor removed were extremely relieved. It involved a complex, lengthy effort to remove the tumor, place a hip bone graft in the void the tumor left, and put in long suture lines from his mouth to underneath his eye and a separate closure across his scalp.

Our teams have now traveled abroad 29 times - Bolivia: 4 times, Ukraine, Moldova, and Siberia: once, China: 3 times, and Vietnam: 21 times - since 1993. Total number of surgeries done by our teams and associates abroad and in the United States is 1,082. As always, these surgeries are possible through the donations, encouragement, and prayers of our many supporters. We give God glory for this tremendous privilege to offer His love to the patients and their families in need of bodily healing and mending of their spirits.