Haiti, Day Five

The front of the County General Hospital. No one uses this, or any of the multi-story buildings. The sign for the Place even collapsed. Next to me is Ben, who spoke French (Creole is a form of French, so he could translate and most people understood him great) AND he has OR experience so he was a huge help. He is currently pre-med and will make an awesome doc.

This is across the street from the County General Hospital. A building completely flattened. The medical school and the nursing school look like this and it is creepy to know how many students are still inside.

Between making my Haitian “Schindler’s List” and getting most of the acute things taken care of between the few orthopaedic surgeons at the U of Miami tent hospital, I felt that I could now leave there and get the chance to see another very different situation. Another resident from our program, Zach Child, happened to be in Haiti on a longer trip, working at another hospital and some from our Utah Hospital Task Force group had connected with him and realized we know each other. So, Thursday I decided to head over to the Haitian University Hospital, but for clarity, we’ll just call it the County General Hospital since that’s what it felt like. If I thought conditions were bad at the U Miami tent hospital, I had no idea how bad they could really be.

The general hospital is/was made out of buildings, but no Haitians trust buildings anymore. It’s no surprise since, at the general hospital, the medical school building collapsed, killing about 57 of the 60 students. To get to the supply area, we had to walk by the nursing school building which exuded the odor of the 80 nursing students who died when it came down. They had just barely begun to pull bodies out since the debris from the collapse was so massive.

So, the Haitian general hospital also became a tent hospital with only the stout, one-story buildings still in use, one of which was the OR building. The OR is so different from anything I could have ever imagined as being appropriate for surgery. This may look sterile, but you have to remember that we are in a completely open room, where flies can just fly in and roost right in the middle of an open incision. Just imagine having to do a surgery in a bathroom stall that hasn't been cleaned, and it is 100 degrees with 98% humidity, and there is someone close enough to touch your backsides doing another surgery right next to you (and then two more like that around a small divider, but still connected).

Operating with me in the above pic is Dr. ____ from Nepal, who is one amazing gentleman. He didn't come with any organized groups. He just saw the news about Haiti, bought a plane ticket and stayed in a humble hotel room while here. He was perfect for this since he had so much experience with 3rd world orthopaedics with limited resources. Very good hands and practical decision-making. He didn't have a military escort like our group or Zach's. He just got on a Tap-Tap or rode in a taxi. Truly someone who gave much and came from afar with no fanfare.The world needs more like him.

Here, we're doing a through-knee amputation. This man had previously had a below knee amputation (BKA) likley due to severe leg/foot injuries. However, his wound was still open weeks after the initial surgery. A BKA is a very functional level for amputation if one obtains a good prosthetic, but a healed through-knee is better than a non-healed and open BKA. So, here we are revising the amputation to this higher level.

You can see an oscillating fan in the picture above. Heaven is when that fan blows its sweet salvation across your part of the room for a second, before moving on to the next person sweating in a sterile/impermeable oven...i mean gown.