KELSEYVILLE — Dr. Paula Dhanda knew at a young age that she wanted to help people.
“I remember going on rounds with my father when I was probably 6 or 7 years old,” Dhanda said. Her father was the chief of surgery at the Bombay Hospital in Bombay, India at the time. “I was always inspired by him, watching him take care of patients.”
Her father often spent time taking care of the poor, which also inspired her to help people in need of care in poor countries.
On Saturday, Dhanda will venture to Haiti for the second time with a team dedicated to helping those in desperate need for medical care following the 7.1 earthquake that crippled the country in January 2010. It is yet another step in Dhanda”s career of helping people.
Before Dhanda started college, she spent time volunteering in hospitals and working as a nurse”s aid. After graduating from the Upstate Medical University at the State University of New York at Syracuse, she found herself in Beverly Hills at Cedars Sinai Medical Center teaching surgery to resident doctors. But she didn”t feel right at the prestigious medical center.
“That was not the kind of practice that was right for me,” she said.
She began to look for a new area to relocate to, one that had a shortage of physicians.
“That”s how I found Lake County,” she said.
She settled in Lake County in April 1990. Since then, she has served as the first woman chief of surgery at St. Helena Hospital in Clearlake, became the first full-time obstetrician and gynecologist in the county and with the opening of her specialty care and surgery center in Kelseyville, has the only accredited surgery center in the county. She has continually brought new surgeries to the county, such as laparoscopic, laser and minimally invasive surgeries.
Dhanda”s first mission trip was to the African country of Tchad in April 2009. A surgeon friend had told her there was a great need for women”s care in the country. She spent two weeks at the B?r? Adventist Hospital. Dhanda said the trip changed her life.
“I always knew I wanted to help people but that made it different for me,” she said. “It just makes you realize that the need is everywhere.”
Growing up in India, Dhanda said she saw a lot of people in need but was too young to comprehend it.
“You don”t see it the same way when you”re a child as opposed to when you”re mature,” she said.
Her mission work next took her to Haiti for the first time in November 2010. She said the team went around election time, so it was a bit chaotic.
“On top of the usual chaos, there were problems during the election time with safety,” she said. “For the physicians, we had armed guards at the hospital gate. We had armed guards outside our sleeping quarters.”
She said the guards did not want the doctors to leave the Hospital Bernard Mevs Project Medishare compound, located in a poor part of the capital of Port-au-Prince, during their two-week stay.
Upon arriving at the hospital, Dhanda said things were a bit messy.
“The windows were boarded up,” she said. “The light switches were broken. Instruments were in a kind of disheveled mess.”
Dhanda said the Haitian doctors there were quite resilient.
“They do a lot with what they have,” she said.
The nine-person team of volunteers was allowed to bring 100 pounds of luggage per person. As a result, Dhanda said they brought 900 pounds of medical supplies. The team acts as a sort-of all-purpose medical and surgical unit.
“We do whatever needs to be done while we”re there,” she said.
Dhanda said a typical day consisted of eight to ten hours of surgeries. In between surgeries, the doctors would visit the clinic and see patients with varying problems. Because Dhanda specializes in gynecological and obstetrics, she said she worked whenever they needed her because of a lack of gynecologists in the country. She would also assist with any emergencies at any hour of the day.
Volunteers came from all over the world, many from Canada and the United States. She spoke highly of them and their Haitian colleagues.
“It”s really amazing that we all come together and work with the Haitian staff and provide care,” she said.
Dhanda said the need for medical care is still great in Haiti, which is why she is going back so soon.
“One-million people are still living in tents,” she said.
The medical school in Port-au-Prince was destroyed in the quake, so part of her job there is to train the more advanced medical student doctors to be self-sufficient. Medical students with less experience acted as translators.
“We can only do so many surgeries in the time that I”m there, but if I can leave something behind as far as teaching?that”s really important to me,” Dhanda said.
Dhanda said mental preparation is key before leaving on Saturday.
“It”s like going to war,” she said.
She said that she wasn”t prepared for how hard it would be on her mentally when she returned from Tchad.
“My husband said I didn”t speak for two weeks,” she said. “There”s so much suffering. There”s so much death that you see.”
To mentally detoxify herself after this next trip, she said her family would join her for a few days at Disney World in Florida.
Dhanda plans to continue to do mission work. She has committed to a colleague to go to Nepal. She said she would go on more missions, but mission work is quite expensive. To help offset the cost, she created a skin cream, as part of her specialty care practice. All the proceeds go to funding her mission work.
She said the people of Lake County have helped her and been very generous.
“The 4-H group painted rocks and sold them and gave me $100,” she said. “I really like that children here are learning about the giving part of it.”
Despite the mental and monetary toll mission work takes on Dhanda, she said it all is worthwhile. She is thankful for all who have supported her along the way to fulfilling her life”s work.
