Today was chock full of activity. We were go, go, go all day, at both work an
d play. After morning meeting we ran straight to clinic to start seeing patients ... before we could even start today's patients, there were 21 patients whom we couldn't see yesterday because a) we had to run to surgery and b) a storm rolled in last night and everyone left rather than wait for us to get out of surgery. And the thing is, almost every single one came back to be seen! They were that desperate for care, even from a bunch of minor leaguers like us! It was kind of humbling and I made a mental note to do my best and be nice to everyone no matter how tired I got. One of the things that they want in medical volunteers is the ability to roll with things and be flexible, and today proved why they ask you that stuff. Almost right off the bat, one of the translators points out a kid waiting patiently in the hallway, saying something to the effect that I might wanna see this lil' tyke first. He
had broken his left arm this morning and was just sitting on a bench with a deformed elbow
and wrist. If that weren't enough... he had blood dripping from his wrist which seemed to be coming right from the region of the break - uh-oh! Since it's an open (or what you'd call a "compound") fracture, that warrants an urgent washout of the fracture and usually some sort of fixation, in this case smooth pins through the skin. Back home, we'd send him up to the OR, have whoever was up working in the OR that day take care of him, and then go back to seeing clinic patients. Here, Liz, Tom, and I had to put clinic on hold and run to the OR and take care of it, then come back! We get the flypaper room once
again and manage to not have any flies land on the sterile field today. Since it's an open fracture, Liz busies herself mixing up some antibiotics right away to administer to the kid ASAP, and finds another victim -er, recipient- for her pocketful of tetanus vaccines. The little guy has a supacondylar elbow fracture too, so Tom fires in the three pins for the elbow cause I've got my hands full holding the elbow reduced ("located") and there aren't any residents like we have back home. And he actually does a better job than most of them (shh, don't tell them that). We then literally run upstairs to slurp down beans and rice in 5 minutes (everyone stares at us lik
e we were raised by wolves) and then back to clinic, where we step right into a hornet's nest. It seems the translators have lined the remaining patients up in order to be seen. We still have about 5 or 6 patients from yesterday to see, and we haven't even seen the first patient for today yet! The #1 patient for today (they all have numbers, just like when you go to get your tabs or license renewed at the DMV), who's been waiting since 7:30, claims that all these people from yesterday who've been jumping ahead of her are getting
preferential treatment cause they obviously must be the translators' friends. To make matters worse, the two translators - we'll call them M. and M. - take opposite sides and join in the fray. I do my best impression of a small speck of dust in the corner and try to look invisible. If the three of us get torn to pieces by an angry mob, would that make the front page of the Star-Tribune? Or would it simply be a short obituary waaaay back by the foreclosure notices? At least Tom and Liz would be listed together because they're both "S"s, but I'd be by myself AND way back cause I'm a "Y." Or would Liz be by herself cause she lives in St. Paul and get published under the Pioneer Press obits? Fortunately all of this turns out to be moot as we
opt for the most Minnesotan of all passive-aggressive moves, i.e, "forget" who was waiting from yesterday and see the irate old lady who was #1 today. ("Oh, I'm sorry, you've been waiting all day yesterday, slept outside in the rain last night, and have been waiting all day today? That's just so terrible! Well let me see this nice little old lady and you'll be next! You betcha!") Everyone settles down and the old lady suddenly turns into the sweetest thing in the world once she gets her therapy appointment and free ibuprofen. (ER vis
its cost $1 but orthopaedic care is free.) We run back to the OR to clean out the amputation stump on the same lady from last Sunday (p.s. - the PC term is "residual limb" but stump is a little more elegant) and it looks a lot better. Now even in the middle of all this hullaballoo we still take time, all three of us, to stop, take a deep breath, and say nice things to each other like "you're doing a great job" and "yeah this is kind a hectic, but think how much better of a story this'll be than if we had nothing to do" and "think how long these poor guys have been waiting." Back to clinic to finish up, and by then all three of us reaaaaallly need a few beers and some pizza which we've been fixating over since last night. We walk back through the local neighborhoods to the hotel where the UFGH folks are staying (there's about 20 of them, mostly from
the Boston and NJ areas). These guys are super friendly, open, and inviting and accept us right into their group. They're attendings, residents, pre-med students, nurses, and therapists and they've been to some amazing places like Ghana, India, and Haiti - every year! The walk to their hotel proves to be yet another eye-opening experience. I'd like to save you the trite things people say when they experience the utterly squalid conditions people live in, but I can't. Kids bathing in a drainage ditch - and smiling, cause they really came out cleaner than when they went in. One house standing intact, next to a pile of rubble that used to be the house next door. Houses, piles of rub
ble, and tents all intermixed, the bricks of a neighborhood held together by the mortar of piles of trash and filth. And again, people living here just normal folks like you or me. Except they have just had some real crappy luck lately. I won't pretend to be an expert on the Haitian people but as far as what I experienced I felt safe, and everyone I saw was super friendly and courteous. We queue up to buy some douces, (sweets you buy in little booths made of figs and coconut) and despite the humble origins and the flies buzzing on the display items it tastes waaaay good. Several of our translators live in the area - this is their neighborhood. Jeanty now lives in Tent City on the hospital grou
nds, and Claude lives in the very neighorhood we're walking through. Jeanty's a normal 26 year old guy who's got a cute girlfriend and likes to play drums and guitar. Unfortunately his house is now a pile of cinder blocks so it's kinda hard to play music except for when he gets to borrow stuff (Dave, part of t
he Loma Linda crew managing the hospital supply room, has helped him out there). Fortunately he still has the girlfriend. The hotel is super nice, kind of an interesting contrast with the neighborhood we just walked through, and we have a great time talking with Raja and Richard from Patterson NJ and Boston Medical Center respectively (somehow they've been friends for 10 years). And yes, we do finally get our beer and pizza. Liz has to go back to the hospi
tal early for her English lesson to Michard, the would-be Concordia student ... now that's dedication! As it turns out his knowledge of the rules of English grammar are fairly advanced and is asking about terms that the three of us have no idea about. Tom and I hang out a bit more at the bar with Juliet and Rolando and then get a ride back to the hospital to check in with Jess from Hotlanta about tomorrow's surgery schedule, visi
t the preop area where the people come to stay before tomorrow's surgeries, hang out in the break room for a bit and talk to Jeanty (his breathing is a lot better after last night's episode) and then hit the sack, thinking about all the different stuff that happened to us today and trying to make sense of it all. For us, since we're here for such a short time, it really comes down to trying to do a tiny bit of good work (9 days of chock-full workdays is still only 9 days after all) and meeting some really cool people. We've met a lot of good pe
ople here, Haitians and non-Haitians, and that makes everything else seem to fall into place.
d play. After morning meeting we ran straight to clinic to start seeing patients ... before we could even start today's patients, there were 21 patients whom we couldn't see yesterday because a) we had to run to surgery and b) a storm rolled in last night and everyone left rather than wait for us to get out of surgery. And the thing is, almost every single one came back to be seen! They were that desperate for care, even from a bunch of minor leaguers like us! It was kind of humbling and I made a mental note to do my best and be nice to everyone no matter how tired I got. One of the things that they want in medical volunteers is the ability to roll with things and be flexible, and today proved why they ask you that stuff. Almost right off the bat, one of the translators points out a kid waiting patiently in the hallway, saying something to the effect that I might wanna see this lil' tyke first. He 
had broken his left arm this morning and was just sitting on a bench with a deformed elbow and wrist. If that weren't enough... he had blood dripping from his wrist which seemed to be coming right from the region of the break - uh-oh! Since it's an open (or what you'd call a "compound") fracture, that warrants an urgent washout of the fracture and usually some sort of fixation, in this case smooth pins through the skin. Back home, we'd send him up to the OR, have whoever was up working in the OR that day take care of him, and then go back to seeing clinic patients. Here, Liz, Tom, and I had to put clinic on hold and run to the OR and take care of it, then come back! We get the flypaper room once 
again and manage to not have any flies land on the sterile field today. Since it's an open fracture, Liz busies herself mixing up some antibiotics right away to administer to the kid ASAP, and finds another victim -er, recipient- for her pocketful of tetanus vaccines. The little guy has a supacondylar elbow fracture too, so Tom fires in the three pins for the elbow cause I've got my hands full holding the elbow reduced ("located") and there aren't any residents like we have back home. And he actually does a better job than most of them (shh, don't tell them that). We then literally run upstairs to slurp down beans and rice in 5 minutes (everyone stares at us lik
e we were raised by wolves) and then back to clinic, where we step right into a hornet's nest. It seems the translators have lined the remaining patients up in order to be seen. We still have about 5 or 6 patients from yesterday to see, and we haven't even seen the first patient for today yet! The #1 patient for today (they all have numbers, just like when you go to get your tabs or license renewed at the DMV), who's been waiting since 7:30, claims that all these people from yesterday who've been jumping ahead of her are getting 
preferential treatment cause they obviously must be the translators' friends. To make matters worse, the two translators - we'll call them M. and M. - take opposite sides and join in the fray. I do my best impression of a small speck of dust in the corner and try to look invisible. If the three of us get torn to pieces by an angry mob, would that make the front page of the Star-Tribune? Or would it simply be a short obituary waaaay back by the foreclosure notices? At least Tom and Liz would be listed together because they're both "S"s, but I'd be by myself AND way back cause I'm a "Y." Or would Liz be by herself cause she lives in St. Paul and get published under the Pioneer Press obits? Fortunately all of this turns out to be moot as we
opt for the most Minnesotan of all passive-aggressive moves, i.e, "forget" who was waiting from yesterday and see the irate old lady who was #1 today. ("Oh, I'm sorry, you've been waiting all day yesterday, slept outside in the rain last night, and have been waiting all day today? That's just so terrible! Well let me see this nice little old lady and you'll be next! You betcha!") Everyone settles down and the old lady suddenly turns into the sweetest thing in the world once she gets her therapy appointment and free ibuprofen. (ER vis
its cost $1 but orthopaedic care is free.) We run back to the OR to clean out the amputation stump on the same lady from last Sunday (p.s. - the PC term is "residual limb" but stump is a little more elegant) and it looks a lot better. Now even in the middle of all this hullaballoo we still take time, all three of us, to stop, take a deep breath, and say nice things to each other like "you're doing a great job" and "yeah this is kind a hectic, but think how much better of a story this'll be than if we had nothing to do" and "think how long these poor guys have been waiting." Back to clinic to finish up, and by then all three of us reaaaaallly need a few beers and some pizza which we've been fixating over since last night. We walk back through the local neighborhoods to the hotel where the UFGH folks are staying (there's about 20 of them, mostly from
the Boston and NJ areas). These guys are super friendly, open, and inviting and accept us right into their group. They're attendings, residents, pre-med students, nurses, and therapists and they've been to some amazing places like Ghana, India, and Haiti - every year! The walk to their hotel proves to be yet another eye-opening experience. I'd like to save you the trite things people say when they experience the utterly squalid conditions people live in, but I can't. Kids bathing in a drainage ditch - and smiling, cause they really came out cleaner than when they went in. One house standing intact, next to a pile of rubble that used to be the house next door. Houses, piles of rub
ble, and tents all intermixed, the bricks of a neighborhood held together by the mortar of piles of trash and filth. And again, people living here just normal folks like you or me. Except they have just had some real crappy luck lately. I won't pretend to be an expert on the Haitian people but as far as what I experienced I felt safe, and everyone I saw was super friendly and courteous. We queue up to buy some douces, (sweets you buy in little booths made of figs and coconut) and despite the humble origins and the flies buzzing on the display items it tastes waaaay good. Several of our translators live in the area - this is their neighborhood. Jeanty now lives in Tent City on the hospital grou
nds, and Claude lives in the very neighorhood we're walking through. Jeanty's a normal 26 year old guy who's got a cute girlfriend and likes to play drums and guitar. Unfortunately his house is now a pile of cinder blocks so it's kinda hard to play music except for when he gets to borrow stuff (Dave, part of t
he Loma Linda crew managing the hospital supply room, has helped him out there). Fortunately he still has the girlfriend. The hotel is super nice, kind of an interesting contrast with the neighborhood we just walked through, and we have a great time talking with Raja and Richard from Patterson NJ and Boston Medical Center respectively (somehow they've been friends for 10 years). And yes, we do finally get our beer and pizza. Liz has to go back to the hospi
tal early for her English lesson to Michard, the would-be Concordia student ... now that's dedication! As it turns out his knowledge of the rules of English grammar are fairly advanced and is asking about terms that the three of us have no idea about. Tom and I hang out a bit more at the bar with Juliet and Rolando and then get a ride back to the hospital to check in with Jess from Hotlanta about tomorrow's surgery schedule, visi
t the preop area where the people come to stay before tomorrow's surgeries, hang out in the break room for a bit and talk to Jeanty (his breathing is a lot better after last night's episode) and then hit the sack, thinking about all the different stuff that happened to us today and trying to make sense of it all. For us, since we're here for such a short time, it really comes down to trying to do a tiny bit of good work (9 days of chock-full workdays is still only 9 days after all) and meeting some really cool people. We've met a lot of good pe
ople here, Haitians and non-Haitians, and that makes everything else seem to fall into place.
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