Welcome back readers!Well, after a six month hiatus, your favorite orthopaedic surgery team is back down in Haiti! If you're reading us for the first time, glad to have you following. We'll try and have something informative and maybe even mildly entertaining for you to read on a nightly basis this week! We just arrived yesterday at Hopital Adventiste d'Haiti in Carrefour, just west of Port-au-Prince. This time, we've got all the bases covered - Tom and I; Paige Saunders, Heather Ross Chalupnik, and Amy Beer for anesthesia; Jessica Bice OR nurse extraordinaire; Beth Bard MS4 and soon to be world traveler (she's doing medical stints in Uganda, India, and Sweden); and General Adam Schuda, surgical technologist, US Army Reserve. Now Tom being at a new job as tissue recovery coordinator for LifeSource, and Amy being from Methodist, we're no longer the Hennepin team, strictly speaking, but "Hennepin to Hait" sounded better than "Various Medical Professionals from the Twin Cities to Haiti".
Taking a cue from our previous three trips we had a fundraising party (Eighties for Haiti, check out the photos on our facebook pages) which raised $1167. Combined with everyone's individual fundraising efforts, including several thousand dollars raised by Tom, Amy, and Heather on GoFundMe.com, as well as $1000 from the Rotary Club of Duluth on behalf of Beth, we were able to recoup a large part of our costs on the trip. This helped a lot since each of us is paying for this ourselves and taking vacation time to come down here.
With snow flurries in the Twin Cities earlier this month, one might think that the heat would be a welcome respite, but that relieved feeling only lasted, oh, about 15 minutes. Which is about how long it took Tom to soak through the first of 12 bandanas he brought down. After haggling with a team of porters for our bags, we found our driver and made the trip to Adventiste. Along the way, we see the first signs of change here in Port-au-Prince: things actually seem cleaner! Now you certainly wouldn't eat off the streets (the 8-second rule is a zero-second rule) but the long stretches of road and sidewalk completely covered with trash are much shorter. The tent cities are still here in the capital however, and as we travel west to Carrefour, things are not quite as clean. The piles of trash are back, and in the middle of them picking out yummy tidbits you still see dogs with engorged teats and crooked limbs, pooping where they like and kicking back dirt with their hindpaws just like dogs everywhere.
Our first night in we meet Dr. Terry Dietrich from Appleton, WI, who's out here for the year, and he fills us in on what's new down here. As we make our evening rounds the first thing we note is that the hallways are cleared out. Those of you who followed last trip's blog in July and November 2010, might recall the lack of space and lots of people having to recuperate from or wait for surgery in the hallways (including one poor soul with no family who balled up his poopy adult diapers and threw them down the hall). They've really made an effort to switch from crisis charity hospital mode to some compromise with their pre-earthquake fee-for-service mode. Along the way, they've built a system that ironically has provided a level of orthopaedic care that has never been seen before in Haiti ... a hospital with one full time and multiple part-time US-trained orthopaedic surgeons. A hospital where Drs. Dror Paley and John Herzenberg, two world-renowned experts in limb deformity correction, bring residents to learn. A hospital where a 11-year-old girl with Blount's disease and a botched prior correction (which her original local orthopaedist charged her family $16,000 for) can have her severely bowed legs straightened correctly this time - for free.
Although we didn't hit the ground running as hard as the prior two trips, we do notice one girl on rounds whose wound is looking fairly soupy so she needs a washout and dressing change in the OR the night of our arrival. Today, we have three cases in the morning - washout and bilateral long leg casts on a 16-month-old, washout and VAC change on a poor guy with an open (that's "compound" in plain English) tibia fracture, and removal of bilateral Taylor Spatial Frame external fixators on the 11-year-old girl above. Adam has the ubiquitous health care professional's fanny pack which at first glance looks amusingly like a stuffed Speedo worn over his scrub pants. After OR, we have some free time for a day trip to the beach near Jacmel, about 3 hours' drive away. The road does wind its way zigzag through the mountains, and we're all crammed into the back of two pickup trucks. With the thought of those mountains fresh in his mind, Tom - as we are all just standing waist-deep in the warm Caribbean waters - asks, "so, what elevation do you think we're at now?" There's a long pause as Amy and I look at each other, wondering is this a trick question, before I answer, "uh, zero?" and Tom, followed immediately by the rest of us, starts laughing is rear off.
Well, it promises to be a busy week like the last two trips, and we're all looking forward to the upcoming clinics and surgery days. We're also curious to see how we'll fit into the existing team down here and be busy and productive while at the same time respecting the people who've devoted a year to being here. Well, here's to a great week!
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