Patient selection complete

January 12, 2010
A note from Dr. Goldberg, Mission Director.Last night, our staff completed review of the cases for selection for surgery. There were 16 patients chosen with a plan do 2 cases every day starting Monday Feb 8 through and including Tuesday Feb 16. The plan is that Friday Feb 12 will be a 'no surgery' day to allow recovery of staff... and to allow patients to move through ICU to Telemetry.Regarding case selection......... this was one of the most difficult tasks to carry out. We adhered to some principals that we set out..Operate on people who are sick, but who are most likely to have good long term outcome. Operate on people who can move through ICU quickly, so as to not create a bottleneck and prevent surgery from being done .... and therefore, denying surgery to some individuals.Dr. Bishop had seen over 100 patients in December and he whittled the list to 30... we then had to further reduce the list. But in the end, we can help a significant number of people with an average age of 20. The youngest is 9 and the oldest is 33. The second youngest is 10 and then we jump to 16. This is what the mission is all about... a life saving operation for young people... and your help to accomplish this is greatly appreciated