Photo caption: Joli Chou checks on one of her post-op patients on the Africa Mercy ship.
Photo credit: Ruben Plomp. © Mercy Ships.
Spending two weeks on a cruise ship seems like the perfect escape from winter, but for Joli Chou, DMD, MD, of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, it was a “working” vacation. She spent most of her time performing surgical procedures on African patients who couldn’t otherwise get them.
Chou has volunteered her time and skills for the past two years, on the Africa Mercy. Operated by Mercy Ships organization, the ship stays docked at an African port for 10 months, providing an array of medical services.
Many of Chou’s more complex cases stem from a lack of access to treatment. For example, last year an 18-year-old showed up with a huge benign tumor on his jaw. “It weighed five pounds!” Because it was left to grow untreated, he had to undergo multiple surgeries to remove and reconstruct his jaw. In this country, “we’d diagnose it much earlier and try to shrink it with injections,” she said. “But he did very well. He actually smiled.”
Chou loves the work on the Mercy Africa because “everyone goes to help surgeons, nurses, even the cooks and they go out of their way to do what they can. I feel like everyone works hard to support the same goal.
System News, which publishes this week. She is just one of many health care providers at Penn Medicine who find time in their busy schedules and lives to embark on these types of medical missions. Other outreach trips have included providing cardiovascular services in Vietnam and orthopaedic care in Nicaragua, all in challenging conditions very different from those at home. A feature story in the forthcoming spring issue of
Penn Medicine, the alumni magazine for the Perelman School of Medicine, will take readers behind the scenes on these trips across the globe.