I wonder if you have lived a day which has changed your life. Well I suppose that I just have. This was my first day doing surgery in Haiti. I don’t want to get into gory details but I have never seen anything like this in all my life. They tell me that last week was much worse. Well all I can say is that I am glad that I didn’t see it.
The grounds of the University hospital in Port-au-Prince has become a tented camp. Each of the tents is a ward with twenty patients in it. The tents spread in every direction as far as the eye can see. Where there are trees the patients are under tarpaulins stretched between the trees. That area is called ‘The Jungle’ and is the biggest ward of all.
In there are two doctors, forty beds, some firemen from Spain in beautiful uniforms who smile all the time, and then some Haitian nurses. I am not sure where the nurses came from because this is a land of disaster and just next door to ‘the jungle’ is the rubble of a huge building, which was the Nursing School. It collapsed.
On the ground floor all the second year nurse trainees in the whole of Haiti were having a lecture. On the first floor, all the third year nurse trainees in the whole of Haiti were having a lecture. There was not a single survivor.
I am having trouble getting my head around this. I am trying to relate it to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Well here goes... Imagine all the car parks around the hospital covered in tunnel tents six metres wide and thirty long, filled to the brim with patients relatives and carers.
Milling around in the paths between the tents are volunteers from every country in world, carrying stretchers, moving boxes of equipment and leading patients or relatives in and out of the hospital.
Those parts of the hospital still standing (outpatients) have been converted into operating theatres. We are operating on trolleys set up in the middle of a waiting room, using head torches to work.
Yesterday, two of us working side-by-side did twenty five cases all supervised by one anaesthetist who literally danced between the tables keeping patients alive but asleep. Calm, swift, and confident he was like a good Puck, always there just when we needed him. As for the wounds. No! I don’t want to talk about them. They are dreadful.
A ballet dancer for the National Dance team has lost a leg. She is lovely and smiles a little, but I have got to try to save the rest of her leg. I have no X-Rays. I am guessing.
This is a very important decision and I am trying to work out quickly what is best to do. If I take too little she may die of gangrene, and I desperately don’t want to take too much. Meanwhile the physicians looking after the wards are popping their heads through the door and asking if we can take another amputation or an infected wound.
Medical expertise from around the world
There are at least eight operating theatres working simultaneously in different parts of the hospital each run by different countries with different expertise. The Norwegians have a surgeon with a skin grafting knife, so tomorrow we will try to get the patients who need grafts to them. A young man has lost the back of his elbow. The skin muscle and joint itself have all gone but the soft-tissue at the front which carries all the nerves and arteries to the hand is fine. I can’t amputate this arm when the hand is working perfectly, but the wound is already infected and I must make a decision.
I stick my head into the door of the US operating theatre. I want to meet them and I need some help and support here. I run the case past a softly spoken Head & Neck surgeon from New York. He listens carefully, agrees that this is a problem which needs evacuation to their hospital ship, and walks over to a harassed looking doctor in the corner with a clip board.
Next moment I am asked if I can have the patient outside the door in ten minutes as there is a helicopter leaving for the hospital ship and they have plastic surgeons on the ship. We bring him across on a stretcher, tuck our meagre notes under his legs and within moments two soldiers from 82nd Airborne have transferred him onto their gurney, slipped him into the back of a Humvee ambulance and are away to the helicopter landing strip.
Minutes later, John the American is back in our operating theatre asking if we can take three cases as they are swamped, with another influx. We start working a little faster still. Each patient who has had an operation has written in bold letters on the dressing when and what is needed next. That is almost the sum total of the notes available. Patients are being moved the whole time, so we may have a name but we cannot always find the patient.
The fire service volunteers from Spain are brilliant at this. They have beautiful black and red jump-suits and always say “Si. Esta Possible”. We give them the name of the patient and with seraphic smiles and a stretcher between them they trot off into the melee of tents to find the patient and bring him back. I don’t know how they do it as they only speak Spanish but their way with people is wonderful to watch.
When I was in Afghanistan I saw people do brave and kind things. I also saw them go that extra mile and finish a job that they really didn’t have to do. Here I have seen an even higher level of commitment. Everyone in our team from the porters up is working, thinking, anticipating, to the utmost of their ability. Giving their best. Every time I needed something it was there before I even asked. If it wasn’t there because we did not have it, then someone was running across to another team operating somewhere else to see if they could borrow some equipment or help.
The end of the day
We have to stop as darkness falls but as we finish the last case of the day, two more loads of supplies arrive. Doctors of the World (Medécins du Monde) is the most fantastic organisation. While we are working as a whole team of logisticians, a chain of people stretching back to Paris, Madrid, Montreal and London are beavering away day and night to get the right kit to us as quickly as possible. We have gone through thousands of dressings today. As the day ends, new ones arrive from the other side of the world. Now that is what I call organisation.
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