The skilled surgeon and his OR team

The years of planning, screening patients, organizing, arriving, and preparing are all necessary for the critical 60 minutes of bypass time and 30 minutes of cross clamp time necessary to correct the child's intracardiac defect. During this time, all the pieces of the team must come together in complete synchronicity and harmony for Dr. Michael Mill to surgically heal the child on the OR table. Closest to him is Jenn Ditto, OR Scrub nurse, and Ruben Bocanegra, physicians assistant, while Bill Nicotra runs the bypass machine and Dr. Gene Freid keeps the patient unconscious, immobile, and pain free. This team that works so well at UNC hundreds of times a year, is now displaced to a foreign land some 7900 miles away. They are in the final stages of preparing their Ugandan counterparts to continue these procedures independently with their own team once we depart. The handoff has occurred....Drs. John Omagino, Tom Mwambu and Michael Oketcho are the Ugandan Cardiac Surgeons; Obwin John the Scrub RN; Sam Wambuzi the perfusionist; and Dr. Cephas Mijumbi is the anesthesiologist.