Day 1

After spending the morning traveling we landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti early this afternoon. Most of the flight appeared to be non-Haitian relief workers. It was hot in the 90's, and humid. Tom's head immediately sprung to life, gushed forth geysers of liquid, and started working overtime salivating like Corky ogling a dish of ice cream. Problem solved with the first of a long series of bandanas he would don today. The bumpy van ride to the hospital was an eye opener. 98% of the rubble from the quake is still not cleared, but life goes on with people buying and selling at markets, fixing trucks by the roadside, and hawking frozen bottles of pop on the street amid the rubble.

Late in the afternoon we arrive at Hopital Adventiste d'Haiti and meet Nathan and Amy Lindsey as well as Dave, Mike, Sarah, Julie, Kevin, and the rest of the crew (mostly undergrads and grad students at Loma Linda University) who serve as the expatriate staff here. Now these guys sure know how to run a tight ship. They're careful to work in support of the local staff and not patronize. They know everyone's name. They have good relationships with surrounding hospitals outside Port-au-Prince to coordinate transfers. Best of all, they're all really cool people! The supply rooms are well organized, there are security people at the entrance to the hospital and to the ward, and the hallways are clear. In the OR, there's a functional C-arm for intraoperative x-ray imaging, and the supply rooms are well stocked with everything you could need to fix a broken bone with, from Ilizarov fixators to SIGN nails. One supply room we entered seemed to go on and on forever, packed high to the ceiling with sutures, dressings, hand sanitizers, bottles of peroxide, etc ... reminiscent of the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when they stick the Ark of the Covenant in the basement of the Smithsonian. Best of all the OR's are air-conditioned and I can read Tom's mind ... "forget the open air wards and mosquito netting sweating it out on my cot ... I'm coming down here to sleep!"

No wonder this place does more orthopaedics than anywhere else in Port-au-Prince. Although our trip at once seemed doomed, being bounced around from group to group over the past several months, it looks like we hit the jackpot with Adventiste and these awesome young Loma Linda folks and we made the right choice.

Almost as soon as we arrive however, an unfortunate gentleman gets admitted to the ortho ward who fell off a truck 2 days ago. Xrays show he's got a right shoulder dislocation and a right calcaneus fracture. Yeah his shoulder's been out for 2 days, but we have to give it a try. At 5pm on Saturday there's no anesthesia staff here, so we go online to Micromedix and check proper dosing, hunt down some Ketamine in the anesthesia cart downstairs, get a pulse ox on his finger and have O2 standng by, Liz pushes 100mg of it slowly over a minute, we get him totally sedated, and the three of us get his shoulder reduced with a nice satisfying ka-chunk! Nothing like hitting the ground running! After putting a shoulder immobilizer on, checking his post-reduction films, and making sure he's doing OK (his pain is much better than it was the last 2 days!), this was followed by a quiet evening in the staff room with snacks, AC, a video about the hospital produced by Adventiste Health International, and of course taking advantage of the wi-fi!