| UCSF Nurse Changing Children's Lives  When
filmmaker Donna Dewey took the stage on March 23, held
her Oscar statue and thanked the "Academy" for
recognizing the efforts of the nurses and doctors
involved in Interplast, she was thanking almost 1,000
people -- some of whom work at UCSF.
"A Story of
Healing," which was co-produced by Carol Pasternak,
received the Oscar in March for best documentary short
subject. It profiled Interplast, an international
volunteer organization that provides reconstructive
surgeries to children with cleft lips, cleft palates and
other debilitating birth defects, on its January 1997
trip to Vietnam.
Although she was not on
the trip that was featured in the film, UCSF nurse Sally
Griesbach has been on seven Interplast missions,
including trips to Vietnam, Chile and Ecuador. A nurse in
cardiothoracic surgery, she has worked for UCSF for 13
years. The chair of Interplast's nursing committee, she
has been an Interplast volunteer for ten years and for
each trip she makes to assist in reconstructive
surgeries, she uses all the vacation time she's accrued
for the year.
"We started going to
Vietnam in 1994, one of the first groups of our type to
go there," Griesbach said. "There's actually a
pediatric urologist here at UC, Larry Baskin (assistant
professor of urology), who will be leaving for a trip to
Vietnam next January." Several UCSF people have been
involved with Interplast in one way or another over the
years, Griesbach said.
Interplast's aim is to
make itself obsolete. "The goal of the trips is to
make it so we don't have to go back," Griesbach
said. "Part of it is helping the kids out with
surgery, but the other part of the trip is education.
Some sites have matured to such a degree that we're not
going back."
Interplast teams set up
temporary operating rooms in resource-poor areas
throughout the world and stay for two weeks, doing an
average of 100 surgeries per trip. Parents sometimes walk
for days to bring their children to the Interplast
clinics, Griesbach said.
"Children with cleft
lips and cleft palates are completely ostracized,"
she said. "One mother brought her child in with a
bag on his head, out of shame. Some cultures believe the
mother must have done something sinful."
Although they come at the
expense of taking a personal vacation, Interplast trips
give Griesbach an experience not easily forgotten.
"There's nothing more
thrilling than taking a child who is badly deformed into
the operating room and in a couple of hours showing the
mother a child who looks like a normal boy or girl,"
Griesbach said. "Knowing that that child's life has
been changed forever is amazing."
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1st appeared 4/10/98
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