FOLLOWING his visit to Linden last week where the Overseas Medical Assistance Team, coming in a collaborative effort with the Linden Fund, was able to complete some 20 surgeries in three days and held a number of clinics around Linden, New York based surgeon, Dr Stephen Carryl says that he was very pleased and impressed of how things went this time around. As he looks forward to next year being the 20th anniversary the lead surgeon says that it will be special.
As he reflected on what was achieved whereby 20 major surgeries were successfully done Dr Carryl, who is Chairman of the Department of Surgery and Director of the Residency Programmed at the Brooklyn Hospital Centre, said “I was satisfied with this trip, it was good because I think sometimes when I come I really focus on my expertise and I thought that just expanding it next year will mark 20 years since I started coming to the Linden community.”
Dr. Carryl who was recently appointed Medical Director of International Medicine at the Brooklyn Hospital Centre established the OMAT unit in 1992. He was born in Linden and migrated with his family in 1979.
As regards his impressions of the new Linden Hospital Complex he remarked: “The other excitement is that I find the new hospital is very functional. You know always new is good, but you could have a new thing that is not really functional. And the hospital really I think, I came last year and toured it, I didn’t really work in it. It was just about to open and with the new operating theatres as they call it, I think they are beautiful, they are big so there is not an issue of space which was an issue before.”
Looking back over the previous 18 years Dr Carryl recalled: “I think the old hospital was literally just a cubicle. In my mind what they had first was just the theatre and the old hospital was built in 1928. Its old thinking and old architecture so this new place, I mean excited us. We were able to do stuff back and forth. In the old one you had to literally get a patient off the bed to bring in the next one. In the new hospital you could start preparing the other patient….I worked with Dr Farouk Ryasat on a case where I had to assist him but he was in one of the rooms. I just came and scrubbed out, joined him in the room and went back to the other theatre.
So that is a great set up to make you achieve more, you are more efficient. I feel as though I spent my time very wisely and efficiently while I was here.”
Dr Carryl further stated “next year what we would see as the 20th anniversary I am going to do something special. What I am anticipating is that I will bring doctors from a cross-section of specialties to address some of the challenges here. I was recently appointed to be the Medical Director of International Medicine at the hospital where I work. So my focus will be to bring a team of doctors that will have a neurologist. I am going to come next year with a team that represents every specialty that is here. I know all the men in the town with folay catapter that really don’t have a real long term solution I am trying to address that problem. That’s a personal one. The neurologist was coming with me but his dad got sick and it was cancelled. But I want to bring an urologist, I will also try to get an optician, a gynecologist to come and I will try to get a neurologist surgeon even though there is not a big population in neurosurgical cases, but there are a few cases here.”
In addition, Dr Carryl said he would like to do certain basic things that could help the OR functioning. According to him OMAT will donate some of the supplies for the hospital and in other cases purchase some like new operating instruments. Actually the OMAT team already has possession of some of these items “but I couldn’t bring them with me and some cattery machines that they could benefit from.”
He stressed: “I looked at the OR equipment and some of them have engraved on it ‘property of the Mackenzie Hospital.’ So you could tell if that is what it is called, they are very old.”
Last year Dr Stephen Carryl and his wife JoAnn donated a $1M (US$5,000) cheque to the Linden Chapter of the Guyana Cancer Society to assist in paps smear. This he said was because when the OMAT was here in 2007 “we were told of the need for women to have pap smears. And so we had made a pledge, my wife and I, and also the OMAT but we made a personal pledge from our own funds.”