‘Dr. Buck’ offers Mongolians help, hope

Dea Davidson
International Mission Board
Dr. A.H. “Buck” Rusher cuts a path through the crowd of Mongolians clutching X-rays and records, opening the outer office door and unlocking the inner. The clinic is open.

Every available seat is taken as a 47-year-old father describes his initial stages of lung failure. Listening to the man’s chest, “Dr. Buck” makes a hard assessment.

“You can’t make a bad lung good, you can only make it worse,” he says. “I’m afraid if we do the operation, he will die. It’s better for nature to end his life than me.”

An hour and eight patients later, the clinic closes as the award-winning general surgeon attempts to shut the door while changing clothes. He dons teal scrubs, cinching them around a frame 15 pounds lighter than when he began his tenure two years ago.

Heading into surgery
Pounding down the surgical wing of Ulaanbaatar’s First State Hospital, Buck enters a prep room a thousand miles from the countryside hospital he visited last week. He scrubs in using real soap, not detergent, in a sink used only for pre-surgery. A white-capped nurse pulls a fresh scrub shirt over his arms. For this operation, there will be no delays waiting for an anesthesia machine.

Beep … beep … beep … beep. The heart monitor is the only sound permeating the room as Buck takes his place next to the patient.

“I don’t like to play music in the operating room,” he says of the silence. “I feel like I’m entering a holy temple. I don’t like people to have their attention diverted.”

Dr. Nyamkhuu, his partner and the country’s most celebrated surgeon, pauses as Buck takes a scalpel in hand.

“Lord, help us with this case,” he says.

Nyamkhuu nods at the prayer.

Friends across cultures and time
Theirs is a 15-year friendship, marked by tragedy and joy. He is one of three physicians Buck brought to the United States for training following his first short-term visit to Mongolia. While there in 1993, Buck was moved by a medical community that deserved a chance to make progress after communism. Although they didn’t share a language, Buck brought the doctors to his practice and home in Jonesboro, Ark., for one month. The trio trained in laparoscopy, becoming the first laparoscopic surgeons in Mongolia.

“There was a lot of gesturing, pointing and diagramming,” Buck says of the trip. “I looked like a mother duck with goslings behind me.”

Saying goodbye to one of these mentees one year later was a defining moment in Buck’s Mongolian journey. After a celebratory meal during his second trip to the country, Buck and his wife, Pam, contracted food poisoning. So did the entire party. Three days later, when Buck was stable enough for a medical evacuation out of the country, he went to see his friend.

“We saw him in the ICU before we left,” Buck says, remembering. “I looked at him, he looked at me, and we both knew he was going to die. We stood around his bed and cried. Two days later he died. Had he been in a more developed place, he wouldn’t have [died]. I am really grieved by the fact that if I hadn’t been sick, I could have attended to him.”

Pushing through his grief
That grief could have kept Buck from returning to Asia. Instead, the loss of a life he’d poured himself into fueled him to a deeper commitment to Mongolia and to reaching one of its influential people groups — doctors. Responding to a request for Southern Baptists to serve as overseas medical workers, the Rushers first planted themselves in Mongolia in 2001. The move fulfilled Buck’s life dream to use his skills in vascular, chest and abdomen surgery for Christ.

“My people group has become the doctors — especially the surgeons — of Mongolia,” Buck says. “As a result of finding the Lord their lives have completely changed. Their wives see something different in them. Hope.”

That group of hopeful doctors formed an English Bible study in 2006 that later became a church. For their Easter 2008 service at a cancer hospital, the newly christened Shine Alxam (New Steppes) church had a high attendance of almost 50. The group of medical Christians now shares Buck’s perspective on life, one far different from Buddhist doctors and their patients.

“Patients feel life is not all that valuable because you come back,” Buck says. “Doctors don’t see death like I do. I see somebody’s heading to eternal life.”

Often complications
Holding on to precious life is difficult when the post-operation care causes complications. Making rounds before surgery, Buck finds a man tampering with his wife’s stomach drain, causing the tube to reverse the bacteria. Walking on to the Intensive Care Unit, a doctor teaching a group of residents calls him over for a consult. Rolling the patient, Buck discovers bed sores. These cases provide teaching opportunities.

“I just had contact with 20 students,” he says, pulling off rubber gloves. “If they notice my lapel pin or manner of treating nurses, maybe they’ll see that I’m following the Great Physician.”

Mongolia’s medical field is no small population with 6,637 doctors for the country’s 2.5 million people — one doctor for every 375 people. Mongols don’t go into medicine for the money. After paying for school and their 18-month residency, each makes approximately $150 per month through the socialized system regardless if they are a cardiac surgeon or a general practitioner.

As Buck builds rapport with these physicians, telling stories like the prodigal son before a gallbladder or liver surgery, he is giving them a lesson they don’t expect. Nyamkhuu’s eternity was also changed from his work with Buck. He came to faith 10 years after he first heard the Good News.

“God really did something when He let us meet,” Buck says. “When I met him, it became important to learn Mongolian so I could tell him about Jesus. The friendship superseded language.”

Partners in touching the countryside
“Big wolf” and “Little wolf” (as Nyamkhuu calls them) are a light in the capital as well as in the countryside where they offer their services to small aimag (regional) hospitals, scattering seed as they travel. In the western city center of Khovd, Nyamkhuu and Buck offered surgeons The Purpose Driven Life book and New Testaments between surgeries. The last night of their trip, the surgeons came to their apartment carrying fish and sheep meat. Close to midnight, they began asking: What do Christians believe? Nyamkhuu, the country’s foremost surgeon, answered with conviction and influence while Buck backed him.

“Nyamkhuu and I can read each other’s minds,” Buck says. “It’s like dancing — you just know what the other steps are going to be.”

As Buck leaves the hospital each day, he pauses on Ulaanbaatar’s streets to say, “Thanks, God, for the opportunity to live here and work.”

“There’s nobody who has had a better medical opportunity than I’ve had here,” he says. “I’ve had an open invitation to do what I want to do. This is our people. When we’re home, our prayer is for Mongolia.”

Update: Several months after the Rushers completed their most recent stint in Mongolia and returned home to Jonesboro, Ark., Buck was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Following surgery and radiation combined with chemotherapy, he is again receiving chemotherapy through November. Aside from a little fatigue, he was feeling few side effects, said Pam, when we talked with her in early August.

“We feel part of the reason he’s done as well as he has is around-the-clock, around-the-globe prayer,” she said.

What has happened is an affirmation of their decision to go “when the Lord told us to go,” rather than waiting until after retirement, she added. “He (God) knew what was coming.”

Act

Specialists in fields such as pediatrics, gynecology and radiology are highly respected in Mongolia. For more information, contact ripetoharvest@pobox.com.