Dr. Mac Johnson of Durango may have retired from hands-on emergency medicine a decade ago, but his drive to help people in medical need is as strong as ever.
For the past 15 years, he’s put his passion to practice in rural Honduras where health care is limited and common drugs like Ibuprofen are “miracle drugs,” as he called them.
Johnson said he’s always loved working in the emergency room because it meant being there for people who need him. He’s always loved the idea of volunteerism as well, but work and family life just didn’t leave enough time for it.
Once his kids left the nest, he and his late wife, Carolyn, who died in 2016, decided they could finally pursue something new. Browsing the internet, they came across a nonprofit group called Cape Cares.
Cape Cares is a group of doctors from across the United States dedicated to developing clinics in rural Honduras. According to a fundraising letter from the organization, volunteer doctors treat Honduran residents for chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) and asthma; perform acute care for infections, insect bites and allergies; and tend to machete wounds and cooking burns suffered at work and at home.
That’s the kind of work that appeals to Johnson, he said. He and his wife signed up for a couple of back-to-back trips that Cape Cares calls “health brigades” and they were hooked.
The village he’s visited most is Los Encinitos, situated near the Guatemalan border in west Honduras. Johnson said the clinic there is in an old, crumbling orphanage with unreliable water and electricity. The number of patients who visit the clinic is declining because people are leaving work in agriculture for new lives in the city.
Given there are fewer patients in Los Encinitos, Cape Cares is shifting its focus to another location in El Rodeito in south Honduras where the doctors believe they will be able to help more people, he said. Cape Cares is in the midst of a fundraising campaign to develop a 7,000-square-foot building with facilities for dental work requiring compressed air and suction, and clinic space for orthopedic surgeons and eye surgeons such as opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists.
The campaign has raised about $100,000 and has another $100,000 to go. The building is being built by partner nonprofit Mayor Potencial. People interested in supporting the project can donate online at https://bit.ly/3BV4qEk.
The intent with the building is to have a space not just for Cape Cares crews, but for other medical teams to set up shop, he said.
On a typical trip, Johnson is joined by several medical practitioners and a group of dentists. They fly into an airport outside Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital city.
They meet their liaison – who he said is a “wonderful woman who's really just indispensable to our functioning.”
The liaison transports them in four-wheel drive vehicles over rough, rudimentary roads to the clinic. They can only visit certain times of the year because seasonal rains raise the river and flooding makes some roads impassable, he said.
Besides nature’s whims, Honduras’ Customs Administration Agency is a challenge for Johnson and the Cape Cares doctors. He said they rely on a company that specializes in shipping pharmaceuticals into countries. The liaison often picks up the shipment and meets the doctors at the clinic.
They use WhatsApp, social media, churches and radio broadcasts to announce Cape Cares’ arrival.
Johnson said they’d work for about a week and treat about 600 patients in 15-minute sessions. They spend an hour or more on people with more complicated problems, but generally, they have to work fast in order to see everyone.
“It was pretty rewarding,” he said of a recent trip. “We knew we weren’t making dramatic differences in their lives, but we were treating high blood pressure, diabetes, old men with big prostates that couldn’t get through the night without getting up three or four times to pee.”
He said a fellow Cape Cares volunteer and nurse practitioner at Boston Children’s Hospital has been networking with Honduran doctors so Cape Cares has professionals to refer patients to; patients who need treatment for complicated issues such as congenital heart disease, spina bifida and congenital orthopedic hip dysplasia.
“Instead of saying, ‘Yeah, you’ve got this, but I can’t do anything about it,’ now we’re saying, ‘This is what you have, and we have a place where we can refer you to where hopefully they can help you,’” he said.
A lot of patients are suffering chronic pain in their lower backs, necks, knees and shoulders. He said many people walk three or four hours to reach the clinic. He said sometimes they arrive on horseback; sometimes they arrive on a burro. Sometimes they arrive after nightfall, after the clinic is technically closed, but they are never turned away.
“They’re out there swinging machetes eight hours a day, plus, every day, and the women are bent over wood-burning stones, making tortillas,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of aches and pains. There’s a lot of gastrointestinal stuff. … General parasites. They can describe the animalitos (little animals) that they see in their stool, so we bring down medicine for that, too.”
Often, an Ibuprofen or Tylenol is all it takes to help a patient with their chronic pain, he said. Young women who are pregnant or are going to get pregnant are treated with vitamins, prenatal vitamins and folic acid.
Johnson said his late wife, Carolyn, was a skilled Spanish interpreter with enough medical knowledge she would often help another patient in the time it took him to get up, go to the pharmacy and return with medications for a previous patient.
“By the time I got back, a lot of times she’d say, ‘OK, this is what he’s got, and this is what he needs,’” he said, laughing. “’Why am I here? She’s on top of it.’”
cburney@durangoherald.com
