Medical Screening Day

Many people stood under Africa’s broiling sun for hours, waiting for Mercy Ships surgeons to examine them. According to the Mercy Ships crowd control team, by 8 a.m., 2,000 people were already in line for the medical screening.

Patients screened will fill a large part of the floating hospital’s surgical calendar. A second screening is scheduled for early July in the city of Takoradi in Southwestern Ghana.
Throughout the day Mercy Ships doctors examined patients with stigmatizing conditions; medical problems that often leave them outcasts of society.

“We see a lot of people with very desperate conditions; people who live in shame; people who have never been to the (city) because they’ve basically been living in hiding,” said Programs Director Chris Guillebeau as he worked crowd control. “They have large tumors on their faces. They have disfigurements and things that cause (them) to be removed from society most of the time.”

Mercy Ships offers hope and healing to these social outcasts. Free surgical appointments were made today for patients with cleft-lip and cleft pallet, disfiguring and debilitating burns, blinding cataracts and crossed eyes, clubbed feet and other orthopaedic conditions, as well as the removal of the outsized benign tumors that are frighteningly common throughout Africa.

Screening day is a challenging, but rewarding experience for the crew. About half of the ship’s compliment of more than 300 laid aside their normal duties to help with the mass triage. They volunteered for tasks that range from crowd control to a counseling and prayer station for patients who can’t be helped medically.