No Vacation Surgical Team Spends 9 Days On Mission To Iraq

Maureen O’Keefe spent weeks preparing for her vacation, collecting information and resources and reading up on northern Iraq.

She asked her boss, Stephen Carlson, to come with her, and he agreed.

And then O’Keefe and Carlson worked and sweated for up to 15 hours a day, helping perform 62 surgeries in nine days in the no-fly zone in Iraq.

“That’s my three-weeks vacation,” O’Keefe said Sunday afternoon. “It was worth it. It was good.”

O’Keefe, a nurse anesthetist, and Carlson, an anesthesiologist, were part of an 11-member surgical team sent to Dohuk, Iraq, by Northwest Medical Teams International.

Saturday night, the two flew home to Spokane, after a 30-hour trip by bus, car and plane. Both plan to return to work at Sacred Heart Medical Center this week.

“Every American should go to a Third World country and see what the average person there has to live with,” said Carlson, who’s volunteered for medical missions to other countries. “It’s nothing, really.”

To get to Dohuk, surgical team members rode in cramped, fly-infested buses and cars. Their medical supplies were held up for two days by Turkish guards.

Once in Dohuk, the medical volunteers were assigned guards, each armed with an AK-47. The team screened about 700 Kurds who lined up for a chance at an operation. The volunteers picked the cases they could help, and focused on women and children.

“Once we got there, it was kind of mass chaos,” Carlson said.

The team trained native doctors and left behind books, research and supplies. The surgeons performed the first surgeries in the region on scoliosis sufferers, Carlson said. They treated Kurds plagued with polio and congenital hip dysplasia. They treated children injured in mine blasts.

There was the 11-year-old girl, the first of eight scoliosis operations. After the surgery, the girl’s mother grabbed one of the volunteers and kissed her repeatedly. The mother held up her hands and said, “Allah.”

There was the young boy, whose upper arm had been almost severed in a mine blast several months ago. Except for his mother, his entire family was killed in the blast.

“His mother was visibly upset because he was the last surviving member of her family,” Carlson said. “She was afraid he wasn’t going to make it.”

He did, and his arm will work.

Every night the volunteers returned to their host home still wearing their scrubs, tired and hungry. A throng of locals wanting medical help waited like groupies near the door.

“There was a clinic at the home every night,” O’Keefe said.

In recent years, Dohuk has swelled from about 100,000 people to 700,000 residents, many Kurdish refugees fleeing the troops of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Turkish enemies. Since 1991, forces from America, Britain and France have kept Iraqi forces from flying north of the 36th parallel.

Northwest Medical Teams International, a non-profit agency based in Portland, has been trying to send a surgical team to the region for two years. O’Keefe was a natural, considering she went to Romania for the agency in 1993. She persuaded her boss, Carlson, to join her.

The volunteers had to gather their own supplies, through donations and their own money. Carlson and O’Keefe each bought their own plane tickets, for more than $1,300 apiece, and paid their own expenses.

“Not a lot of people go to northern Iraq on vacation,” O’Keefe joked.

She had to leave certain things behind - both when she left America for Iraq and when she returned. She left her map of the region at home because it referred to “Kurdistan.” That would be a political mistake, O’Keefe said.

And when she left northern Iraq, O’Keefe’s colleagues convinced her to leave a Kurdistan flag behind.

“Maureen was very disappointed,” Carlson said. “She couldn’t bring the flag back. She wanted to smuggle it in her bra.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo