Valley doctor plans mission to Ghana to RESTORE hope
LENDING AN EAR AND A HELPING HAND: Dr. Michael Obeng spends time on the phone in his Boardman office offering services to a member of St. Elizabeth Medical Center’s staff about helping those injured during the recent earthquake in Haiti. The computer shows the hand of a young patient of Obeng’s born with six fingers. The doctor treated the child in Kumasi, Ghana, in 2009.
YOUNGSTOWN — Women in Ghana and most developing countries would rather die of breast cancer than have life-saving surgery and face losing a boyfriend or husband who no longer sees them as whole women.
“It’s sad,” said Dr. Michael K. Obeng, a native of Ghana, who has formed a nonprofit organization, RESTORE Worldwide, to try and reverse that situation. RESTORE is an acronym for Restoring Emotional Stability Through Outstanding Reconstructive Efforts.
The answer is reconstructive surgery, a skill Dr. Obeng, a plastic surgeon and breast reconstructive specialist, wants to impart to Ghanaian plastic surgeons, of which he says there were only seven in a nation of 23 million in 2007.
Dr. Obeng, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center and a staff surgeon at St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown.
Board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, he is also clinical assistant professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and clinical assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. His office is in Boardman Medical Pavilion in Boardman.
Dr. Obeng is founder and chief executive officer for RESTORE. The organization is a nonprofit 501 (c) (3) charitable organization that provides reconstructive surgery and related medical services to children, battered individuals, and individuals with congenital deformities, he said.
The organization aims to restore hope and aesthetic form to individuals that once existed, or to improve the aesthetic form to “how it ought to be,” said Dr. Obeng, who is putting together a team for the nonprofit’s first mission to Ghana in late spring or early summer.
In preparation for the team’s trip, Dr. Obeng said he traveled to Ghana in 2008 and again last year to provide surgical services to women and children and others in need, to determine the most pressing plastic surgery needs, and to lay the groundwork for the mission.
“When I went to Ghana last year, I concentrated on congenital breast diseases and breast cancer, and in 2008 on burns and traumatic hand injuries,” he said.
Specifically, Dr. Obeng visited Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, the region’s largest teaching hospital in Kumasi, the city where he grew up and where family members, including his father, Ransford K. Obeng, still live.
Dr. Obeng, 36, and his wife, the former Edna L. Ductan, live in Poland. Mrs. Obeng is originally from Miami, and has a Haitian background. He has two children, Maxwell K. and Mallorie K. Obeng, ages 10 and 5, respectively, and an aunt in Cleveland and cousins there with whom he grew up.
He came to the U.S. on Aug. 21, 1993, at age 20.
“I worked three jobs to save enough money to start college,” he said, and traveled to Wichita Falls, Texas, on New Year’s Eve to begin his undergraduate college career at Midwestern State University.
He soon became a scholarship student, studying at the University of Texas Medical Branch, and received a fellowship at Harvard Medical School, specializing in hand, wrist and microneurovascular surgery.
The idea for RESTORE came to him while he was a medical student at the University of Texas in 1999 or 2000, when an assistant professor, Dr. John H. Miller, said, ‘You are a surgeon, and you are from Ghana. ... Maybe we should go to Ghana and do some surgery to help people out.’”
“He planted a seed that never left me. It was one of the motivating factors in my decision to specialize in plastic and reconstructive surgery and later in hand, wrist and microneurovascular surgery, and which eventually led me to form RESTORE,” Dr. Obeng said.
He said he decided to create his own group rather than join an existing organization, such as Operation Smile, a children’s charity that treats facial deformities around the world.
“RESTORE doesn’t specialize. My purpose is to put together a team that treats the whole body,” he said.
He said he initially has settled on breast-cancer surgery and reconstructive surgery as a team project because of the attitude in Ghana toward women about the loss of a breast.
In 2007, he said of 156 women diagnosed with cancer at the largest teaching hospital in the capital city of Accra, 60 percent had mastectomies, but only 2 percent had reconstructive surgery.
In 2009, he said one woman, whose breast was removed, would not agree to the mastectomy unless she could also have breast reconstruction.
“This is a nurse, an educated woman,” Dr. Obeng said.
So Dr. Obeng performed the first TRAM flap procedure, which involves using tissue from the stomach to make a new breast.
History was made. That was the first TRAM-flap breast reconstruction in Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, he said.
“Women love the TRAM flap procedure. They get two for one — a new breast and a tummy tuck at the same time,” the surgeon said.
He said he is in the process of recruiting a team for the mission to Ghana in May or June. A fundraiser for March or April is in the planning stage, he said.
Team members will include plastic surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, nurses, and operating room surgical technicians.
“The people in Ghana are desperate for help. People pulled on my coat and said ‘please stay,’” Dr. Obeng said as he was leaving after his last visit.
alcorn@vindy.com