Where in the World Are VANA CRNAs: Olivia Baker
This month, VANA spoke with Oliva Baker, a CRNA at HCA Chippenham in Richmond about her time serving and practicing abroad. Olivia graduated in May 2022 from Georgetown.
This past April I had the opportunity to travel to Belize on a pediatrics plastics trip for a week. Primarily, we worked on cleft lip and palate repairs, but also spent time doing some other ENT and facial surgeries for functional reasons. We worked with patients as young as three months, all the way up to teenagers, but the majority of our patients were three to four years old. This was my first mission trip; I was introduced to the trip by Amber Stein, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Chippenham who has gone on this trip 17 times previously and encouraged me to join. The host of the trip is called World Pediatric Project. We traveled with a plastics team based in Philadelphia and were able to serve 82 patients in clinic and perform 41 surgeries over four days. Every day we started before 8:00am and some days we didn’t get home until 1:00am the following day.
It’s so rewarding to see the patients before and after their surgeries and the outcomes of their procedures. It was exhausting, but the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. The families of our patients were so grateful and appreciative of the care they received – it led to such a wonderful environment for all of us. Most importantly, though, was the knowledge that our patients will have a higher quality of life after they work with us.
Pregnant mothers in Belize don’t get the same levels of folate in their diets that mothers in the United States do, which leads to a higher rate of cleft palates and cleft lips. We can repair these on our trips and follow up with children who we repaired in years previously. For some of our coworkers who have been traveling for close to two decades, these are lifelong friendships. I’m looking forward to my second trip to Belize in January so I can perform more procedures and visit with the children and families I met this past April.
I’ve always dreamed of volunteering on a mission trip and was thrilled when Amber flagged an open spot on her trip. I love working with the pediatric population and traveling and there’s an additional challenge on these trips of being able to work with different and occasionally more difficult equipment. I was looking forward to an opportunity to push myself in ways I hadn’t been able to yet.
When I first walked into the room and saw some of the equipment I would be working with I was nervous because I wasn’t sure I would be able to figure it out, but it didn’t take long to get there. In fact, this trip has actually changed how I practice anesthesia day to day – I feel like we use so many things, especially narcotics and opioids that may not always be needed. Practicing without those options made me reevaluate in my own “real life.”
One specific challenge on the trip was the day a MAC monitor went down. We need to always be looking for a specific range to know that someone is adequately anesthetized, but on this day the monitor stopped working so we no longer knew how to measure what we were doing. It was scary, but I was able to rely more heavily on other statistics to safely accomplish the same task.
Even with the challenges we faced our team was just that – a team. We came home every night and had dinner together, talked about the day, laughed, and had so much fun. Our trip even included a final “fun” day to explore the community where we were serving before we headed home again! I would recommend this experience to all VANA CRNAs. World Pediatric Project has teams for all specialties and in all locations, so if my experience doesn’t speak to your interests, you’ll be able to find something for you.
If you’ve recently gone on a medical mission and would like to share the details with VANA, please reach out to Katie at [email protected].
