They Serve in Her Honor: Volunteer Doctors Staff the Judith Lombeida Medical Foundation, Created to Help Needy Patients in Ecuador, Home Country of Local Man’s Late Wife

By Bill Reed, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo.

Nov. 25–A pregnant woman came to the clinic Mark Backlin’s team set up in Ecuador in July, and doctors soon discovered she needed an emergency Caesarean section if she and the baby were going to live.

One Ecuadorian obstetrician/gynecologist was among the volunteer doctors on the humanitarian mission, and he led the impromptu operation, saving the mother and the baby. At that moment, Backlin knew his wife would have been proud of him. Dr. Judith Lombeida’s life was snuffed out in an instant, but her legacy lingers.

The neurologist and Air Force colonel, who lived in Colorado Springs, was killed in July 2006 in an auto crash. On a trip with her husband and two children, a piece of furniture fell off a truck beside them on the highway just west of Kearney, Neb., and when Backlin swerved to miss it and then swerved to miss other cars, their Suburban flipped and rolled six times.

Lombeida was ejected and died instantly. Backlin was knocked out, and their injured teenage children, Laura and David, found their mother’s body in the ditch beside the highway.

“My kids were in this horrific scene, almost like a bomb went off,” Backlin said. “It’s so hard to see a life like that gone in a flash.”

Laura Backlin, now 21, said the grief was worse because all three family members were stuck in bed, left to think and nurse their wounds.

Seven weeks later, still recovering from head wounds and a broken arm, Mark Backlin boarded a plane for Ecuador, his wife’s native country, to deliver the bad news to her 96-year-old father.

During the flight, the idea came to him. Besides loving his wife of 22 years, Backlin was inspired by her.

“She knew medicine and went above and beyond to help people,” Backlin said. “When patients sat down with her, there was no one else but you.” He wasn’t the only one to be inspired.

“Judith, she was what you call a doctor’s doctor, so that’s who you would send your own family to,” said Dr. Stephanie Schaefer of San Antonio, who served with Lombeida in the Air Force.

“I have a picture of her in my office. She reminds me every day of the type of physician I should be.”

Lombeida cared for her patients in her adopted country of America, and she also organized humanitarian medical missions to Central and South America.

Her efforts reached 40,000 patients and made her the only woman to be awarded the military medal Estrella de las Fuerzas Armadas de Ecuador (Star of the Armed Forces of Ecuador). Backlin, 51, decided he would continue her work. He founded the Judith Lombeida Medical Foundation. “I never in my life thought I’d be doing something like this,” said Backlin.

He is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who works as a civil servant involved in outsourcing at Peterson Air Force Base. He’s scaled back to part-time work for the Air Force as he focuses on his new mission. “It’s scary and wonderful.”

His kids liked the idea, too. “I’m really proud of my dad for being able to do that,” Laura Backlin said. “It doesn’t surprise me because he loved her so much, but because he turned it around so fast.”

Mark Backlin met with the officers in the Ecuador Air Force who had worked with his wife on her humanitarian missions and presented his plan to the head of the Ecuador Air Force, who pledged help with transportation, security, hospital space and physicians. Backlin reached out to the friends and colleagues his wife had touched to help start the foundation.

Schaefer was one of his first calls. Schaefer, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, worked with Lombeida on some of her medical missions. She embraced the idea instantly and became the medicalteam chief, building a team of physicians and volunteers, ordering medicines and labeling them in Spanish, and working with Ecuadorian doctors to scout sites for the clinics.

In July, Backlin’s vision was fulfilled. A team of 18 American volunteers joined 12 Ecuadorian volunteers on their first mission. In four days, they saw 2,500 patients.

“We started in (Judith’s) hometown and saw 1,200 patients there, and one of the first was her dad,” Backlin said. “It’s an incredible way to remember someone who did such awesome things.”

He took a team of surgeons to Ecuador in September, where they performed 22 surgeries, mostly on children with cleft lips and palates.

Backlin is hungry to do more. He’s planning another clinical mission and surgical mission for 2008. The clinical missions cost $30,000 to $35,000, mostly for medicines, while the surgical missions cost only $5,000 since the surgeons donate their time and buy their own airfare.

“You can’t do it alone,” Backlin said. “It takes a lot of people who believe in what you’re doing.”

He’s putting together a jazz concert and golf tournament as fundraisers. He’s trying to recruit corporate sponsors as well, with the long-term goal of building a permanent clinic in Ecuador. A general in Ecuador has already offered to donate land for the hospital.

“I’d like to build a permanent clinic because, that way, you can affect an entire region,” Backlin said.

He wants to focus on cleft palate surgeries, repairing cataracts, dentistry and gynecology. Backlin said these are problems that allow one-time fixes to improve patients’ lives forever.

Schaefer said it can be hard to diagnose subjective symptoms without sophisticated testing equipment, so evident skin problems, dental problems, and eyesight problems are often the easiest to conquer. Handing out free glasses, she said, was deeply satisfying, especially when a woman who hadn’t seen clearly in eight years was overcome with joy when she slipped on her new specs.

“It’s exhausting but it’s also really rewarding, so you don’t realize how exhausted you are until you’re on the plane back home,” Schaefer said.

Backlin readily admits that remembering his wife in this way has helped him and his children — who went on the missions — as they heal.

“It helps the patients, but it helps the people who go, too,” he said. “It’s a way for myself, our kids and her co-workers to remember what she did.”

Laura Backlin said it was hard to return to Ecuador without her mother, but on the medical mission she felt she was walking in her footsteps. Her respect for her mother grew even deeper as she saw the patience and perseverance it took for Lombeida to create a new life for herself.

And she often reflects on her mother’s journey, coming to America at age 18, teaching herself English as she attended college, sometimes failing classes until she mastered the language, and ending up as a top neurologist and a leader in the Air Force.

She cherishes her mother’s lessons of hard work, taking on each day as it comes and chasing down your dreams. Now, she’s using those lessons to take on life without her mother.

“I don’t care what you do with your life, if you believe in it, it will be successful,” Mark Backlin said. “There’s a lot of power in your own belief. I can’t think of a better way to honor her while helping people.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0226 or bill.reed@gazette.com

ABOUT ECUADOR

Population: 14 million

Size: Roughly equivalent to the state of Washington

Gross national income: $4,070 per capita; average wage in communities the foundation has worked in is $4 per day

Total expenditure on health: $261 per capita

Geographical features: Galapagos Islands (750 miles off the coast), Andes mountain range, and headwaters of the Amazon River

History: Civil unrest has marked Ecuador’s modern history, with the country in land squabbles with Peru, and a strong conservative-liberal split inside the country. The country returned to democracy in 1979, however, and free elections have continued since. Sources: World Health Organization; www.geographia.com; thebest ofecuador.com

TO DONATE OR VOLUNTEER

Go to judithlombeidamedical foundation.org or e-mail Mark Backlin at mbacklin@comcast.net.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo.

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