The day started with us waking up and realizing that the hospital was still standing. Last night we moved our cots from the open ward (open because the walls are actually open) to the hallway inside - our temporary hurricane shelter. Fortunately there wasn't too much damage so we're all pretty thankful for that. We are still officially supposed to be on standby for potential victims but it looks safe enough to try and do a few cases as time allows. Morning rounds are highlighted by the two awesomest kids ever, a little boy and girl both of whom have external fixators on. The few kids on he ward are very social and are often going up and down the hallways in their HAH wheelchairs
, visiting each other in their rooms. Fortunately the lady with the pelvic fracture is hanging in there. She's now starting to mobilize all the fluid we've been pumping in to her to keep her pressure up, and is peeing like the proverbial racehorse. Her hemoglobin is back up to 7.5 (still low) after 4 units of blood. So things are not completely out of the woods yet, and we don't feel comfortable yet rodding her femur fracture (best to wait until she's more stable).The guy downstairs smearing poop on the walls is doing it less. Sarah is happy for once that she hasn't gotten any new bugbites, which is a particularly good thing for her since she has a scratched out bugite on her right arm the size of Rhode Island. The rest of the team is in a pretty good mood as well. Tom and I have a thing going where both of us see how much facial hair we can grow in the 9 days of the trip and compare growth at the end. Tom's is coming in nice and thick, wereas mine is coming in in patches like a badly reseeded lawn. However, we've all been working so
, visiting each other in their rooms. Fortunately the lady with the pelvic fracture is hanging in there. She's now starting to mobilize all the fluid we've been pumping in to her to keep her pressure up, and is peeing like the proverbial racehorse. Her hemoglobin is back up to 7.5 (still low) after 4 units of blood. So things are not completely out of the woods yet, and we don't feel comfortable yet rodding her femur fracture (best to wait until she's more stable).The guy downstairs smearing poop on the walls is doing it less. Sarah is happy for once that she hasn't gotten any new bugbites, which is a particularly good thing for her since she has a scratched out bugite on her right arm the size of Rhode Island. The rest of the team is in a pretty good mood as well. Tom and I have a thing going where both of us see how much facial hair we can grow in the 9 days of the trip and compare growth at the end. Tom's is coming in nice and thick, wereas mine is coming in in patches like a badly reseeded lawn. However, we've all been working so
hard the past few days on such little sleep that fatigue sets in quickly for all of us, particularly after tough cases like trying to do a hip fracture without C-arm (the machine hasn't been working the whole time we've been here, though the next team has apparently planned on bringing the parts to fix it). During the third case of the day today, I'm so tired I start nodding off, and the team suggests that we finally wrap things up and tell the remaining patients that we've done all we can do.Tom comes up to me after the case, flapping hi
s hands in the air with elbows bent like an ostrich trying to fly, and says emphatically, "Pat, let's be done." after all, one of the mantras that we've been guding ourselves by over the past week, besides "Do what you can" is "Don't leave the country without Tom." The team is at a breaking point, and it's about time for all of us to get some much-earned rest. We should be happy with what we did and leave it at that. Sure we could try and squeeze in more surgeries but what would happen if out of fatigue we hurt someone. Fortunately it hasn't come to that yet but we all know w're at the breaking point. If we by some chance had the capacity to do 100 surgeries a day, we'd still be unhappy about not being able to help the million other people we couldn't get to. We should be happy with being able to help out those whom we did, and remember that it's not about the number of surgeries but rather more about the individual people we were able to help. It not about us ... it's about them!
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