When he is in the operating room, Dr. Mark Granick doesn’t normally put on his own gloves or wear loose-fitting scrubs or allow nurses to open and close nonsterile equipment while wearing gloves.

Then again, he isn’t usually operating in a clinic on the tropical island of Mauritius.

For two weeks in November, Granick, a plastic surgeon, and his wife, Dr. Carol Singer-Granick, a pediatric endocrinologist, traveled with a team of doctors on a medical mission to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar.

There, the Livingston residents and members of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, “had 25 years of experience condensed into two weeks,” according to Granick, chief of plastic surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School in Newark.

The opportunity arose when Shyam Noruthun, a registered nurse and native of Mauritius, joined Granick’s team at UMDNJ four years ago and encouraged him to take the trip. Although they had often been invited on trips to third-world countries before, they had always declined. In Newark, said Granick, “we do a full array of plastic surgery and with a mostly underserved population.”

But this trip came at the right moment. With their children grown and a personal connection to the island, they agreed to go. It took three years to arrange and then 20 hours to fly there. When they finally landed, Granick said, the geography reminded him of Hawaii, where his wife grew up, with its sandy beaches and rocky, rugged coastline. And, like Hawaii, the country attracts its share of honeymooners who rarely venture beyond the resorts.

Mauritius is a country where 43 percent of its 1.2 million people are Hindu. Residents speak Creole as well as English.

But aside from Shyum’s taking the NJ visitors on a one-man guided tour of the beaches when they arrived, the Granicks didn’t spend much time sightseeing. Granick, who headed the American team, arrived at the clinic at Victoria Hospital in Quatre Bornes early the first morning to find 50 patients lined up waiting. Their ailments ranging from cleft palates and burns to facial fractures, tumor defects from surgery, chronic wounds resulting from diabetes, and hand and face deformities.

A common ailment was microtia, or missing the external part of the ear. “It was almost like a textbook, condensed into two weeks,” he said. He and his team couldn’t handle every case. “Some were too complicated. Some required multiple visits over long periods of time,” he explained.

Other required procedures called for more sophisticated equipment than they had. “There were very sad situations and there wasn’t much I could do,” he said.

But he did handle many of the cases, performing 20 surgeries over two weeks and seeing an additional 10 to 15 patients.

“The patient population is not that different from what we see here in Newark,” he said. “What’s surprising is that we see dramatic cases [in New Jersey] only on a sporadic basis.”

While Granick found that the clinic had some sophisticated equipment, like machines for doing CT scans and carrying out hyperbaric oxygen therapy (used for people who go scuba diving and get decompression sickness, also known as “the bends”), in general he described the facility as “antiquated.”

He said the main sterilization machine “was left by the British after World War II,” and primitive sterilization techniques are a major challenge. (Mauritius was colonized by the Dutch, French, and British before gaining independence in 1968.)

He added that supplies were low; he estimated having just 10 percent of what he was used to operating with.

The sole plastic surgeon on the island was quite capable, according to Granick, and had trained with a prominent Belgian plastic surgeon. The problem was, “he’s working in isolation from other plastic surgeons. The island is as isolated as you can get on earth.” With Granick’s help, the local doctor learned how to do a host of reconstructions, including breast and ear.

Granick said he picked up a few surgical techniques from his Mauritian colleague as well, along with some of his manner of interacting with patients.

For Carol Singer-Granick, who serves as associate professor of pediatrics at UMDNJ, the challenges were slightly different. Because her diagnoses often rely on sophisticated laboratory tests unavailable on Mauritius, she had to rely instead on her clinical evaluation skills, even for children with very rare diseases.

And because the island has never had a pediatric endocrinologist, it took nearly the entire first week for the locals to figure out how to use her. (There is one endocrinologist on the island, but he does not treat children.)

She treated children with such common ailments as diabetes and others with extremely rare and “weird” diseases, including one requiring a lab test sent to South Africa for diagnosis. (Singer-Granick was unavailable for an interview.)

Granick and his wife viewed this trip as the beginning of a long relationship with the people of Mauritius; he said they plan to return on a yearly basis.

Granick, who directs UMDNJ’s residency program in plastic surgery, is contemplating creating a program for the residents to join the mission. He has already begun soliciting companies that manufacture sophisticated medical equipment to donate machines temporarily to be used during his next stay in Mauritius, and has received a few commitments. When they return next year, Granick said, his wife plans to set up speaking engagements around the island to teach people how to treat and manage pediatric diabetes; Granick already has 14 surgeries scheduled.

The reward, said Granick, is that the surgery he performed on the Mauritians “can have a profound effect on the kids and their families.”

The parents of one child with microtia were so grateful for his work that they invited him to their home to celebrate.

In addition, the trip provided “an opportunity to see how a plastic surgeon can not only survive but thrive in an environment we see as primitive.”