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Dudley is an Onalaska resident and a nurse anesthetist at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center. With a wealth of medical expertise and an eagerness to help others, she has traveled to some of the poorest countries in the world to treat orphans, train doctors and assist in surgical operations that improve a child’s smile.
“Once you start, it’s like any other addiction,” Dudley said. “It’s hard to stop.”
Dudley went on her first medical mission in 2000, when she traveled to Peru to treat children at an orphanage sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of La Crosse.
Later she became involved with Health Volunteers Overseas, an international organization of health professionals that travels abroad training third-world doctors and nurses in “first-world” medical practices.
She also has worked with Operation Smile, an international health organization that provides free cosmetic surgeries to treat cleft lip and palette, the world’s second most common birth defect after club foot.
On her last medical mission trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in December, Dudley said her crew performed 200 lip and palette surgeries, although 900 people showed up seeking the operation. (The other 700 people received slips of paper reserving their spot in line for operations the next year.)
Cleft lip is not considered a life-threatening ailment, but the cosmetic defect affects speech and often forces children to be held back in school.
“These kids are ostracized. They’re abused and used by other people. They’ll walk around wearing a scarf over their face,” Dudley said.
After the operation, she said, “their whole lives are changed. Rather than being kept out back or outside of society, they can rejoin their families in a more social way.”
In the United States, children are usually treated for cleft lip and palette within the first three months of life so the defect seems rare. The ailment still appears in one in every 600 births worldwide.
Dudley’s trips have taken her to China, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cambodia and the Gaza Strip, among other places. Although some doctors can donate up to a year of their time doing charity work, Dudley said, she only has the “luxury” of volunteering for one- to two-week stretches.
On five of her mission trips, the crew received grants to cover expenses, but for the other 10 Dudley paid for her own plane tickets, room and board.
The medical crews come prepared to perform surgery 12 hours a day, five days a week at local hospitals. They work side-by-side with local doctors and nurses and will only use their first-world medical equipment when necessary. Equipment often has come from foreign hospitals anyway, such as the anesthesia equipment Dudley used in Ethiopia that came from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Traveling to some of the poorest countries on Earth, Dudley said she returns to America a changed person, acutely aware of all our excesses. But she has no intention of cutting back on her medical missions. Tentatively, she plans to travel to Bolivia in November, Peru the following March and Africa the following winter.
“Poverty around the world is such a huge issue,” Dudley said. “I don’t know what the answer is, but if we each can do a little bit, it will probably help a lot.”
Adam Bissen is a reporter at the Onalaska Community Life.
