Sunday Times 2
Showcasing a life’s work
It is Thursday and his ‘List Day’. Even at 12.30 in the afternoon there is no thought of lunch for he is doing what he is best at – saving lives through his skill.
This is what Consultant Surgeon Dr. Gamini Goonetilleke has been engaging in for 33 long years not always in environments as well-equipped as the Operating Theatre (OT) of the Sri Jayewardenepura General Hospital. Outstation hospitals as well as the trenches in the north and east amidst the mud, blood and shattered bones of soldiers who had fallen victim to landmine blasts or ‘battas’ (anti-personnel mines also known as Johnny battas) have been equally good enough for him.
Come next Thursday evening, Dr. Goonetilleke will exchange his day’s green scrubs for an evening suit and stand beside his life’s work in photography form, appropriately at the auditorium of the College of Surgeons.
catches up with him for a chat while he is scrubbed, capped, masked and gloved, with scalpel in hand, in OT 4 just before he deals with a goitre problem and then walks across to OT 5, next door, to check on how his trainee is doing.
As Dr. Goonetilleke, surrounded by his team, opens up the exposed neck area of a male patient fully covered in surgical garb, we hear of a medical career that started as a student at the Colombo Medical Faculty, followed by an internship and then training in surgery at the General Hospital (now the National Hospital), a stint in the United Kingdom securing the ultimate qualification in surgery, the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS). This had been followed by over six years in Polonnaruwa and over five years in Gampaha before arriving at the Sri Jayewardenepura Hospital in 1993 where he has been for two decades plus one year.
Oft, however, he would leave the comfort zone of Colombo to treat the battered and blasted casualties at the war-front, on medical missions he began long before putting down roots in Colombo.
From the beginning of the war in 1983 to its end in 2009, he has operated in different hospitals – Polonnaruwa, Anuradhapura, Vavuniya, Ampara – as well as the Army Base Hospital in Palali and the Military Hospital in Colombo.
In the bunkers scattered across the north, not only had he performed amputations but also visited the sites of the blasts and even so many years after, there is much emotion when he points out that anti-personnel mine injuries are the “greatest” violators of international humanitarian law. During a conflict, combatants fall victim to this deadly menace while after the conflict it is the civilians who face their wrath. This is why he also depicts through his photographs, what surgeons can do in the rehabilitation of these hapless people.
“During my 33 years as a surgeon, I have witnessed many different surgical conditions not found in textbooks or medical journals,” he says and this is what has prompted Dr. Goonetilleke to showcase his life’s work, mainly captured by himself and in a few instances by his team.
Now close to retirement, it was while he was flicking the pages of his bulging albums that the thought crossed his mind, encouraged by his peers and juniors, to let the photographs be viewed by the public.
“Some even tell a story,” laughs Dr. Goonetilleke, explaining that they come in a “series” from the time the patient was admitted to hospital, when he or she underwent the operation followed by the recovery.
There are some lessons too for the viewers – how patients could have presented themselves earlier and how certain diseases or injuries could have been prevented.
He concedes that he has tilted in favour of giving “a lot of prominence” to injuries, the commonest condition which requires hospital admission. “Do you know that 800,000 patients with injuries get admitted to Sri Lankan hospitals every year,” asks Dr. Goonetilleke, pointing out that the authorities have to spend a lot of money on them. Some of these patients die and others are disabled and unable to get back to their occupations.
Picking out road traffic accidents, he is quick to point out that six people die each day, 180 each month and a huge 2,000 each year. This is much more than the dengue death toll which is about 180 per year.
Rural areas also have their own unique problems, according to him, with many falling victim to agricultural machinery as well as trap-guns and the human-elephant conflict. This is why, according to this veteran Surgeon, injury-prevention should be an important aspect of health service.
He cannot resist mentioning the photographs of the “rare condition” Rapunzel Syndrome which, of course, is to do with hair, but not long tresses flowing from a woman’s head but a ball in the tummy.
The mess that quacks and certain others leave behind which has prolonged a condition for so long that sometimes it is beyond cure and the danger of “paththus” applied to fractures which sometimes could lead to an inexorable amputation have also been recorded on camera.
It is not all gloom though – there is focus on new treatment methods, keyhole surgery for gallstones and lasers for other conditions.
His “cabinet of stones” will also be on display — huge calcium stones in patients in the North Central Province for which laser is not the answer, only surgery, which he had performed. “The ladies who visit the exhibition will be able to take home designer gall-stone necklaces,” he says, tongue-in-cheek.
Dr. Goonetilleke’s favourite, however, is oesophagus (gullet) surgery that he has performed numerous times and gone behind the lens to record.
“Patients who come in with corrosive strictures are in a bad state. They can’t eat or drink. They can’t even swallow their own saliva. Most of them are poor and don’t have the money to get surgery done,” he says.
The “job satisfaction” that this Surgeon gets after major surgery lasting six to eight hours to create a new gullet using the stomach or the large bowel can only be imagined from his expression.
For him no thank-yous are needed though these flow in abundance – just the look on the patients’ faces as they relish their first meal is more than adequate.
All these oesophageal reconstructions and much more can be seen in the 300 photographs — both black-and-white and colour — that Dr. Goonetilleke will exhibit next weekend.
| ‘A Pictorial Journey of Surgery’
‘A Pictorial Journey of Surgery’ through the lens of Dr. Gamini Goonetilleke at the auditorium of the College of Surgeons at No. 6, Independence Avenue, Colombo 7, will be open to the public from September 12 to 14 from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Promising to be of interest and educational value, as well as an opportunity to view some rare conditions, Dr. Goonetilleke’s photographic exhibition would range from hernia types to surgery complications; diseases of the gullet; goitre complications; corrosive burns; gall bladder stones; bowel and breast cancers; two killers — road traffic accidents & alcohol; to rare conditions including Rapunzel Syndrome and war-time images. |