Day 2

Awoke this morning to the usual hum of people all around us at 6:30. With patients sleeping in hallways, and a veritable tent city of patients, families, and people with no where else to go sprawled outside on the hospital grounds, there's always a buzz of activity. Liz, Tom, & I share a ward full of cots with the Loma Linda students also volunteering here at Hopital Adventiste d'Haiti ("HAH"!). Today is their last full day so even though we didnt overlap all that much we'll miss Kevin, Sarah, Julie, Mike, David, and the other cool ones whom I remember but whose names I forgot! We all head downstairs to morning roll call slash prayer meeting and meet the other groups working here. There's a bunch of docs and nurses from various East Coast places like Khaled from New York, and the trio of nurses from Boston City Hospital and MGH with their thick (yet somehow, oddly enough, endearing) Boston accents. The weather as usual is hot, humid, and intermittently rainy. Rain is good because it cools down a bit until you remember everyone living outside in tents. Sad face. The views from the hospital (most of the hallways are open air) are very nice. You can walk out onto the roof and dry clothes and hang out.

We go on morning rounds with about 45 people on the list to see. The signout census list we use here is just like any other intern-generated list back at home, except half the patients dont have room numbers - instead they have places like "tent," "hallway," and "postop area" listed. The biggest tent on the premises was donated by a medical group from Quebec, with a big maple leaf, so we had one patient whose discharge plan was "d/c to Canadian tent."

We then made "tent city" rounds, complete with chickens (bawk bawk!), a soccer game, and lots of people chillin' outside with external fixators and casts on.

Rounds are interrupted by a few consults from the ER, which gets a lot of ortho referrals. One's a woman who was selling fish, didn't see a hole in the ground, and fell in sustaining a distal radius fracture and a deep forehead lac. Liz gets her Ketamineized again while I supervise Tom & Jessica (a nurse from Macon, just south of Hotlanta) repair her forehead lac and Kevin, a med student from Loma Linda, reduces and splints her distal radius. And then in the middle of all this, I stopped and realize that people selling stuff carrying stuff on their foreheads can't look down to see where they're walking. We see a kid with a supracondylar humerus fracture, go up to the ward to change a VAC (vacuum assisted closure dressing) for an open tibia fracture, and then to the OR for an I&D for a badly infected AKA (above knee amputation) wound with lots of pus gurgling out. Fortunately there's some strawberry oil we find in a drawer that we can put inside our masks! After one more consult, a late night tibia fracture transferred from the U of Miami-run hospital group, we're all pooped! Time to bone up on Creole, keep in touch with people, and crash!