Intro:
Welcome to Loving the Imperfect Podcast, a show for seekers of deeper contemplation. I'm Brianne Turczynski. For 10 years, I've been studying offerings from holy teachers and holy texts. I'm a journalist who has listened to the stories of many people throughout the years, and I continue to be captivated by the stories of how God nudges and directs us, either by closing doors or opening them, so join me as we listen these extraordinary stories and become witnesses to the truth of love.
Welcome back to Loving the Imperfect. Today, we'll hear a story from Dr. Rick Maibauer. He is the first person to perform a total joint replacement in Ghana, West Africa. So, we're going to hear his story today. Another exercise, again, in deep listening. It is good training for us. I hope you enjoy this story. Thank you for joining me.
Rick:
I grew up in Wyandotte, Michigan, which is about 35 miles from here, on the other side of Detroit, on the Detroit River.
My father was a general surgeon and prior to the second world war, there were not very many orthopedic surgeons, the general surgeons, did female surgery and neurosurgery, chest surgery. And it was only really after the war where all these specialties became their own thing. I was born a few months before the second world war started and my father was already commissioned into the army air corps. He found out I was born by telegram.
Several months after I was born, my mother drove my sister who was born in 1939, to Oklahoma City where he was stationed at that time. The interesting part about that is certainly there were no safety belts or things like that in the car. And so, my mother would pick up just about the first military guy who was hitchhiking, and he would drive the car, and my mother would take care of my sister and me. We got to Oklahoma, and we went to Dallas to Love Field, which is a regular airport now. And then to Florida. And then he was gone for four years and gone is gone at that time.
We didn't have cell phones; we didn't have telephone availability during the war in Europe. There was an occasional letter, but he was just gone. He came home in ‘45 when the war was over, he began reestablishing his general surgery practice in Wyandotte.
When I was seven or eight, there was an explosion in Trenton, Michigan, which is 10 miles south of Wyandotte. This [man] was severely injured, and my dad put him back together. And he was very grateful for that. And so, every Christmas he would bring my father a bottle of scotch.
I thought, if my dad can put some guy together, I could put some guy together. And so it was about that time that I decided I'm going to be an orthopedic surgeon.
A little bit of knowledge of my life is that in the first and third grades, I was failed because I couldn't read. It was not until my daughter, who is now 48, when she was about five, the name dyslexia was generated. There was a doctor in New York that tested my daughter. But I was there, my wife and one other daughter were there. And Kathy and I failed that test, just cold turkey. That was the first time I knew I was dyslexic. When I was failed back in grade school, my mother sent me off to tutor a lot, and when I got to Albion, I had to take remedial reading a lot, but I still made it through.
At Albion College, which is a Methodist school, and it was very Methodist when I was there, to get out of Albion College you had to take a religion class. I took Bible as literature. So, I have read the Bible. Reading is not my favorite thing. In college and in life, I get my information with my eyes and ears, but not from the written word. For the most part. Certainly, I must have been able to read. I got through college and medical school, so…you know them is a there or they was as a saw or, you know, things don't make sense. So, you read the paragraph again.
There's a thing in life called bootstraps, and you grab those and get going, and I still got into medical school, and I got through medical school and residency. Then I had to go into practice, and I was offered this position in Rochester.
We moved to Rochester in 1974. I developed a practice here, did a lot of firsts here and throughout my career. I would say someday I want to give back. It was for that reason I ended up being shipped off to Africa.
We went nine times in volunteer surgery, and I was the first person to do a total joint in Ghana, West Africa.
When we had to do surgery in Ghana, I had to take everything over there. From the soap they're going to wash their skin with, to the knives, the instruments, the sutures, my gloves, my instruments, they had nothing over there. And the nurses had no idea how to do a total joint. And so, I took a nurse with me, and she taught these ladies how to assist in total joints and what these different instruments were.
Total joints are relatively new to the world. In Detroit, a total hip was first done in 1972 and 73. And a total knee was done in 73, 74.
To a kid right now, that's a long time ago. But in my life, you know, I was in my young, early 30s when we started doing that. It was just yesterday and certainly those procedures have advanced and gotten better and last longer and all that stuff.
People used to be at the hospital for nearly a week in the beginning and now many of the total joints are done as outpatients.
The national hospital in Ghana is, called Korle-Bu and it's about 10 square blocks, that's a lot of hospital. Their orthopedic hospital was about 150 patients. They had a chest hospital, an OB hospital, and a pediatrics hospital—all in these 10 blocks. There is no money in Ghana, so, they lumped everything together. It’s hard.
They had people in Ghana at that time who had had total hips. But they'd come to the US, they'd gone to England, they'd gone to Cuba, they'd gone to Russia for their total joints. But none of them were done there until I started it and then Dr. Boachie, who was the head doctor over there.
When he was a young guy, he left Ghana when he was about 20, went to New York, worked his way through college in New York, then went to medical school, and he's probably one of the top pediatric spine surgeons in the world. But when he was in his late forties, he said, “I got to give back”.
I said I had to get back. And so, he went back over to Ghana and the program he started was all based on pediatric spine surgery. But then his mother broke hip. He said, well, you've got to do hips over here and we did knees.
The first time we drove up to the clinic over there in, Ghana, there were a whole bunch of kids with club feet sitting on the curb. And so, we ended up starting a clubfoot clinic. Dr. Boachie was doing a spine clinic. Now I'm doing hips and knees, and we started these other things. Now Dr. Boachie has a hospital all to his own, in Ghana, a million-dollar hospital.
The average wage in Ghana is a dollar a day. That comes out to 365 a year. You can't do much on 365 a year. It's a very poor country and having free medical care of this nature is a big, big deal. They were writing about Dr. Boachie in Time magazine. And I got slipped in there, so I made it to Time, I wouldn't have made it any other way.
Dr. Boachie and the Otumfuo, which the king is called, went to college together in the US. And so, he knew him, and when we went there, I got to meet the king. No white guy meets the king. And we met the president, and we were entertained in both of those social groups.
When we first got there, and again, I had to take all my stuff—boxes of sterile equipment and sutures and all this sterile stuff. When we got to Ghana, the custom agent said, “what's this big box?” I said, “it's my instruments for a surgery I'm gonna do tomorrow.” He said, “how much does that cost?” I said, “probably a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”
He said, “that'll be fifty thousand dollars in tax.” I said, “it's free. 20 percent or 50 percent of free is free.” So, they confiscated them. And he wanted to open it up with a razor blade. And I said, “no, no, if you want the box open, I'll open it, but don't use that razor blade. Cause then the things wouldn't be sterile anymore.”
And so that was on a Saturday, I think, and surgery started on Monday and on their radio station there in Ghana, this guy gets on the radio and starts screaming at the government to get the instruments released, because Dr. Boachie knew him too. And so, we got our instruments back. [But] I missed the morning of the first morning of surgery.
Prior 1957, Ghana was run by England.
It was a colony. In ‘57 they were given their freedom. And when the English left, they took all the paint, all the soap, all the things you might need in life. And Ghana didn't have anything. So, the hospital, Korle-Bu, the screens were from 1957. Nobody painted anything. We had to take our own toilet paper.
We had to take our own soap. But the operating rooms a few years before I got there were reconstructed by the Germans. And why that occurred, I have absolutely no idea. But they're all nice stainless steel, operating rooms and everything went well.
One lady I operated on had sickle cell disease. Your red cell in your body looked pretty much like little donuts. The hole in the donuts is not a hole, but it's thinner there.
When you have sickle cell disease, that red cell looks like a little moon, the crescent of a moon. It can get stuck in your capillaries. And that's the capillaries, a little tube between your artery where the blood goes out in your veins, where the blood comes into the capillaries where the oxygen is transmitted to the tissues.
And in these people with sickle cell disease, those little crescent shaped blood cells get stuck in their joints. And so this 30-year-old lady, we were dealing with her hips, and her other joints were bad too, but we were dealing with her hips. And if she took a step, her stride length was about six inches, and she couldn't spread her legs apart and therefore hygiene was an issue.
And how I got her, I have absolutely no idea. But I gave her a total hip. And now she could move one leg. Her stride length was longer. She thought I was a miracle worker. In Africa, the vast majority of people can't get to a doctor.
They train a lot of doctors in Ghana, but more than half of them leave the country once they get their doctorate degree because there's no potential. And salaries are lousy, so they leave. And so you think you're making a lot of doctors, but presto, most of them are gone. They have a lot of bone deformities over there. These people with their bad joints that we replaced have had all this pain for years. With no potential relief, you know, they can't go to the store and get their Tylenol or whatever.
I came back one day before 9 11. If I came back one day after 9 11, I might still be in Africa, because they shut down all the airlines around the world.
Earlier, when I was active in my orthopedic practice, you work seven days a week.
And sometimes you had nothing going on Sunday morning, but if there's a little snow and ice, Grandma would go out and slip and fall and break her hip, and I was busy.
Three incidents, and each one being a little kick in the pants, took us closer and closer to the church:
Jane had an anterior cerebral aneurysm. A third of the people with aneurysms die. A third are severely injured or incapacitated, and a third of them get away with a little glitch. Well, Jane got away with a little glitch.
She lost her recent memory, but she was able to work her job for 20 years. Then she had a major problem with her back and needed a large back fusion. And with this large fusion of your spine, you still try to lean over and tie your shoes.
And so, you try to get more motion at the joint above where the bone is fused together, and frequently people will get slippage at that level. So, she had to have a second back surgery.
And our third big issue, here in this household, was our youngest daughter had a brain tumor when she was in her mid-twenties and ended up having two brain surgeries, six weeks of radiation and 18 months of chemotherapy.
Those three incidents, and each one being a little kick in the pants, took us closer and closer to the church.
We liked the church before then, but we needed a church after that.
Mechanically, I'm pretty good with these two hands I have, and I can see the x-ray, and I see how to fix it. I don't have to go to a textbook anymore. I can put the bones back in alignment and the people who are not so much into Jesus Christ say biology puts them back together.
But there's a lot more to healing than biology. I've been very aware of the fact that I can put them back together, but the Lord has to heal them. Mother Nature's in there, but there's more to it than one thing. The two groups work together.
Biology and Jesus Christ are all part of one big deal.
Outro:
Thank you for joining me on Loving the Imperfect. Next time is a surprise, even for me. But I'm sure it will be just as interesting and nice to hear another story from ordinary people that walk the planet at the same time as us. So, thank you for joining me today.
I'll see you next time. Bye bye.
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