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A new face in the East
UTMB resident helps children in China
AUG. 18, 2004--Once there was a beautiful little girl--not even a year old--who lived with her parents outside of Linyi, a city in the Shandong Province of Eastern China. This little girl was just like any other child her age. She was starting to toddle around and was full of smiles, but there was one thing that made her different. It was something that could cause problems for her as she grew older, including dental abnormalities, speech deficits, and hearing loss--she had a cleft palate.
In China, recent changes in the health care system have resulted in only 330 million people receiving some form of health care coverage in a country with a population of 1.2 billion. Some of the hardest hit citizens are the farming families who have suddenly found themselves responsible for paying for health care that was once provided for them at no cost. Some may have access to village clinics but few are covered for surgical procedures. The correction of a cleft palate is often far beyond a farmer’s financial ability. The surgery averages about $250 in China, if the surgeon doesn’t require a fee. For many farmers, $250 can represent two to three years of income.
“The people there literally don’t have a penny of extra money,” said Dr. Glen Porter, a fifth-year resident in UTMB's Department of Otolaryngology. “A cleft lip is not an emergency.”
Earlier this year, Porter was given a chance to help. He received a $1,000 Humanitarian Efforts Resident Travel Grant from the American Academy of Otolaryngology--Head & Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) Foundation to visit the People’s Hospital of Linyi in order to perform free reconstructive head and neck surgeries for patients who needed them but could not afford them. The hospital in Linyi invited a team of otolaryngologists who specialize in plastic and reconstructive surgery from all over the United States to come and provide humanitarian aid and share modern surgical techniques and research with local physicians. Porter was the only resident on the team fielded by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, a national medical specialty society of the American Medical Association.
This was not the first time Porter had gone to China. While serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a Chinese community in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he became well-versed in Chinese language and culture. In 1995, while a student at Brigham Young University, he studied Chinese language and culture in the Chinese city of Nanjing for two months. In 1996, he spent another three months backpacking through China, Thailand and Laos. While there, he studied the psychosocial impact experienced by local populations due to the building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.
Porter fell in love with China and its people.
“It was wonderful,” he said. “People just invited me into their communities.”
Porter said he had often toyed with the idea of becoming a Chinese language teacher at the college level, but, after he took an anatomy class, his career interest began to take a turn.
“Learning about anatomy is what really turned me on to medicine,” he said.
After returning from China in 1996, Porter undertook his medical training at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, where he earned his medical degree. He and his wife and two children then came to Galveston, where he began his residency training in otolaryngology. His life was busy with the demands of residency, family and religious life, yet, China always remained on his mind. At the end of 2003, he applied for and later received the travel grant from the AAO-HNS.
When Porter and his team arrived, there were many people of all ages from the province waiting to receive the free treatment they could otherwise never afford. Many had a cleft lip or palate. Some had burns or scars that needed correctional surgery. Among them was the beautiful little girl. Porter said he was enchanted by her cheerful demeanor. Happily, he was able to reconstruct her nose and mouth. When the little girl recovers, she should have minimal scarring, and normal speech.
The little girl, like the others, recovered in the hospital for about three days. Although patients receive intravenous antibiotics during the post-operative period, pain medication is not routinely given. Patients are not discharged with pain medications. During the patient’s stay in the hospital, family members cleanse patients’ wounds and feed them.
“There are usually two or three family members at the bedside,” Porter said.
Dr. Byron Bailey, UTMB professor of otolaryngology and former chair of the department, said Porter has been an impressive resident since the first day he came to UTMB. In 2003, Bailey had received the Distinguished Award for Humanitarian Efforts from the AAO-HNS for his own humanitarian efforts in Vietnam and Cuba.
“Glen has great compassion for all his patients and is a man who seems always to seek to do the right thing,” Bailey said. “He gives generously of his time in the hospital, and now it’s great to see him extending his horizon to a global scale. He recognizes the fundamental core value of helping someone who is in need and the satisfaction that comes from doing something for which he receives no pay but is rewarded greatly by the privilege of giving.”
“This effort was consistent with Glen's core values—interest in helping, interest in plastic surgery, and interest in China,” said Dr. Shawn Newlands, associate professor and chair of the UTMB Department of Otolaryngology. “I expect that this was not only an educational experience, but a window into what the future holds for Glen.”
Porter said he would like to continue his medical humanitarian work at some point in the future in the Sichuan Province in southwest China. It’s one of the largest and least accessible provinces in the nation and a place he remembers fondly from his backpacking trip in 1996.
Sichuan residents “are much less prosperous and do not enjoy the same medical advances seen in the eastern cities,” said Porter. “There is a real need in western China.”
Porter, now in the U.S. Air Force, will be assigned to a new duty station after his residency training. He does not yet know where he will be sent. Ultimately, he would like to lead a medical missionary trip back to China and include language training and cultural training for his team.
“Chinese people are wonderful. They are incredibly polite and hospitable. When they find out you speak their language, they accept you with open arms,” he said. “They have a rich cultural heritage, and their language reflects that. You could learn about the Chinese for the rest of your life and still have more to learn.”
Back in Linyi, there’s a beautiful little girl who has learned something, too. She’s learned that caring and loving strangers can arrive from the other side of the world and can make wonderful, life-changing things happen.