Doctor Peter Adamson has dedicated his life to helping others. On Sunday, he returned home to Ontario from Ukraine, where he and his team performed 29 complex facial reconstructions on soldiers and civilians wounded in the war.
“We’ve been doing this work now for 27 years, and in fact, Ukraine represented our 50th mission,” he told Global News.
Face the Future Foundation was launched in 1996 by Adamson as a charitable organization. He and his team have embarked on medical missions all over the world, including Rwanda, Nepal and Ethiopia.
The organization not only performs transformational surgeries, it also educates doctors abroad.
It takes months of planning ahead of missions like this one, assessing patients and devising surgical plans.
“Virtually every soldier we treated, some of them with devastating injuries, their first question was ‘When can I get back to the front to fight?'”
Adamson, a Toronto-based facial reconstructive surgeon, says what amazed him was the resilience of the Ukrainian people and their unyielding commitment to their soldiers.
The surgeries were carried out at the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Hospital in western Ukraine.
Adamson, along with mission director Dr. Anthony Brissett, led a team of 12 surgical and medical volunteers. Brissett, who is also Canadian, now lives in Houston, Texas.
Over the course of several days, they performed procedures on individuals critically impacted by the Russian war. Surgeries focused on severe bony, soft tissue, and eye trauma from bomb blasts, ballistic injuries and shrapnel.
“Often these patients have three or four different areas of the face that have been severely traumatized,” he explained. “They can be missing part of a jaw, missing part of a cheek. The end of their nose can be blown away, and they’ve been left with no eye.”
He tells Global News that the surgeries are largely not one-and-done – they require follow-up procedures.
“We live in a global village and there are many, many challenges,” said Adamson. “Political challenges, military challenges, economic challenges, and health-care challenges. I feel that it’s really important, regarding health care, that we recognize the incredible surgical burden there is around the world.”