Don’t Blame Your Tools
“It is a poor surgeon that blames his tools, since the concepts and techniques of operating grew up in the absence of all these tools, and one should never get married to a technique or piece of plumbing and become dependent on the device or tool that is called upon to do the task. If it is the principle upon which you are calling, then find the next best way to get that principal fulfilled – with or without the plumbing.
“…and still we are continuing to operate. It is not for lack of tools that we will quit. We will continue to do what we can until the cupboard is truly bare.”
-Dr. Glenn Geelhoed, Founder of Mission to Heal (journal excerpts from the Philippines, January 2018)
One of the transformational aspects our work is seeing Western medical students and doctors stretched as they work overseas. When you leave your comfort zone, you are able to learn and grow in amazing ways. In this excerpt from Dr. Geelhoed’s journals, he explains why learning to work outside of your comfort zone is so important. Providing healing care, he explains, cannot be dependent on having a certain piece of equipment or being in a certain location. Our founding principal is that surgical care must be brought to the people, not the other way around. And when we are in remote locations, we must use whatever means available to provide care.
Over and over in the Philippines this year, the Mission to Heal team had to be resourceful when it came to equipment (the “plumbing” that Dr. Geelhoed mentions). We never sacrifice safety in the name of conserving tools, but we also make a point never to use resources frivolously. And in cases where the necessary piece of equipment was scarce, broken, or already being used on the other operating table, we find a way to make do.
In one such instance, Dr. Geelhoed removed a large lipoma using only a bare knife blade because a handle for his scalpel could not be found. In this case, it was not acceptable to our team to refuse this woman treatment just because we did not have the tools we preferred. We had to use a little ingenuity, sacrifice a little comfort, and in the end, we brought great healing to this woman.
Whatever you’re doing today – whether it is mobile surgery in a foreign country or something a little more mundane – we invite you to go the extra mile, even if your tools don’t seem to allow it.
