According to Dr. Harpal Khanuja, Operation Walk Maryland’s medical director, it’s the look in recipients’ eyes and their joy of renewed motion that makes his marathon mission to Peru’s medically underserved so worthwhile.
“I can’t explain how you feel after one of these trips,” Khanuja, a knee and hip specialist at Good Samaritan Hospital and professor of orthopedic surgery at Johns Hopkins University, said of his mid-October trip to Lima. “These people are so appreciative of your skills and time. It’s very rewarding for everybody involved.”
Taken by the volunteer work of Dr. Lawrence Dorr, founder in 1995 of Operation Walk in Los Angeles, Khanuja, after an initial stint south with the Utah branch, decided in January to form a Maryland counterpart.
His wife Maria, an orthopedic nurse, is mission coordinator, and his office nurse Dotsie Czajkowski is its supply coordinator. Three others form the taut nonprofit’s volunteer core.
“We take everything — the surgeons, the anesthetists, the internal medicine doctors, nurses, therapists, office supplies, insurance and all the implants — needed to perform joint replacements,” Khanuja said. “And we go to developing parts of the world, where the poor don’t have access to any of this.”
“Our goal was to do as much as we could in terms of surgery … and we accomplished that,” said Dr. Gurminder Ahuja, chief of orthopedics insurance at Kaiser-Permanente Health Care in Baltimore.
The mission complement this time, Khanuja said, was 48 people, including five surgeons, who completed 48 implants in three days — without cost to the recipients. The doctors paid their own air fare, but other costs — estimated at $100,000 — were defrayed by individual and vendor donations to the all-volunteer, zero-overhead-cost nonprofit.
Implants, valued at $250,000, Khanuja added, and the pharmaceuticals were donated respectively by Wright Medical Technology of Arlington, Tennessee and by Greater Baltimore Medical Center.
“The level of deformity that we saw in Peru exceeded anything that I have seen in my 20 years of U.S. experience,” said Cary Hagan, marketing vice president of Wright Medical Technology, Inc. “Programs like this have a remarkable sense of dedication to help restore motion for people who would otherwise have no hope of mobility.”
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” added Dr. Michael Jacobs, chief of orthopedics at Good Samaritan Hospital, “but it was a wonderfully positive experience.”
Khanuja hopes to conduct missions once a year.
HOW TO HELP
Operation Walk Maryland
5601 Loch Raven Blvd
443-444-4735; operationwalkmd.org.
Baltimore, MD 21239
