On a Mission, Part I: Local Doctors Travel to Peru To Perform Life-Saving Surgeries

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Meet the ISMS Team

ISMS OBGYN's discuss their cases

Dr. Joseph DeBellis leaned against the wall in the hospital hallway, his blue scrubs damp and clinging, his hair touseled and tinged with sweat. The Peruvian humidity slipped in through the open windows and doors, and the combination of heat, exhaustion and emotional overload brought tears. Just for a rare moment, the veil of professional detachment dropped.

“It’s a real good indication that these people care—we all care,” the plastic surgeon said of the emotional moment, which came near the end of a seven-day stretch in April that he and 15 other medical professionals had spent providing charity medical care to the people of Pucallpa, Peru. The mission was the 11th sponsored by International Surgical Mission Support, a Southampton-based charitable organization.

ISMS was founded by three of the medical professionals who made the trip to Peru: Dr. Medhat Allam, a general surgeon from Southampton Hospital; Bob Mineo, a nurse anesthetist at the hospital; and Dr. Ravi Kothuru, a general and thoracic surgeon at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn and a medical school friend of Dr. Allam. The group includes numerous professionals with Southampton connections, and friends from hospitals in other parts of New York.

Since the organization’s first trip in 1997, the annual effort has grown. On the seven-day visit to Pucallpa, the 16-member team did 121 surgeries, the most ever for a single trip. This year a second mission to Morocco was added in May, shortly after the group returned from Peru.

The medical missions are lifelines for the communities they visit—in Pucallpa, an impoverished city in the Amazonian heart of the country, not far from the border with Brazil, scores of people waited for days, some sleeping in the hospital’s outdoor courtyard, hoping to have the visiting American doctors evaluate them. All had gone without surgery because they could not afford it, even in this country with socialized medicine. Most seemed to have more faith in the Western doctors than their Peruvian counterparts.

But the international trips are also rewarding for the doctors and nurses who volunteer their time. They are also trying times emotionally, in part because the generous nature of the relationship instills more emotion than American doctors and patients share in an age of managed care and malpractice lawsuits.

“It not just about people showing up, doing their thing and going home,” Dr. DeBellis said, his eyes welling, having dropped his guard while discussing a particularly difficult case, and his palpable relief that his patient had a near miraculous turnaround.

“It’s about an emotional and very personal journey,” he said. “If it’s not, then ultimately it’s not going to do anyone any good, least of all yourself.”

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The ISMS mission to Peru began on Friday evening, April 11, when a Berkoski Ice truck, driven by Berkoski employee Matt Corbett, pulled into the driveway of Dr. Medhat Allam’s Southampton home. The 14-foot truck, donated by Berkoski Ice, along with the driver, was packed nearly full of equipment and supplies for the trip to JFK—more than two dozen large duffel bags, cases and containers full of things the team would need on its visit, with plans to leave much of the remainder behind. On the last trip, to Zambia in 2007, ISMS left more than $100,000 worth of donated medical supplies and equipment.

The travel is often one of the most trying parts of the mission: many of the countries the ISMS teams visit have strict customs rules, and some tend to be suspicious and even harassing. “In Brazil, they confiscated everything,” said Dr. Vito Alamia, an ob-gyn at Southampton Hospital who has been a part of several missions.

Officials in Lima, Peru, turned out to be difficult—there was a great deal of looking sternly at clipboards, shuffling papers, and furtive looks inside the cases of equipment—but hardly the worst the team has encountered. But after 45 minutes of bureaucratic tap-dancing, disheveling well-packed cases of sterile equipment, Dr. Allam had had enough. As an official asked for yet another bag to be opened, the team’s acknowledged leader stepped forward angrily: “No, no, no—close the bag. That’s it.”

It took another 20 minutes of negotiation before the matter was resolved with the help of an older man with graying temples in a leather jacket. He turned out to be the medical director of the Regional Hospital of Pucallpa, where the team was headed.

At the Lima airport, the team also met a local Peruvian congressman who had helped set up the trip. He had also changed the team’s hotel reservations, dismaying some team members—although it would turn out to be the lesser of his transgressions on this trip.