Haitian black Coffee

Couple of Presidentes with pals in Port-au-Prince! 2 hrs to party pre flight!bring on a cold beeyah yeehah!

AIRPORT BOUND! Miami, here we come!




Gina and a friend in NICU

 

Haiti Day 4-Tuesday

When you commit to going to Haiti, you do so imagining the worst, hoping for the best, expecting.....WHAT?  That it's going to be a vaction?  That, somehow, the attention and the disease and the hundreds of thousands of dead Haitians and millions of homeless Haitians are pretending.  This is not the Truman Show.

Part of our team tapped out today.  In the middle of their shift, 5 people walked away from patients and went home.  Just like that.  POOF!  Gone!  No documentation, no meds, no report, no care, no coverage.......nothing!  No integrity, no regard, no class.... STUNNING!  How do nurses do this?

The remaining team in the PICU/NICU is just amazing.  2 nurses returned from St. Marc's Cholera-palooza and joined in the fun here.  Jerome, who was sick and awakened to cover the mess, is a madman.  It's pretty cool to be a part of such a dedicated team.  And embarrassing to think that the 5 who left represented us in this way.  It's making the rest of us work harder to improve the perception that when things get tough we can just tap out.

Haiti- My sanctuary



Jerome having lunch at my sanctuary.

 There is very little about this place in Haiti that is peaceful.  There is chaos in the streets.  Cholera is not too far away.  Creature comforts from home are missing (some of them...).  Where and how to find some peace????  Believe it or not, I found it.....at a picnic table.


Yes, a picnic table.

Truthfully, it's not so much a picnic table so much as a hunk of plywood on some wooden scraps turned into benches.  However, its place at this hospital is as important as some of the units and the people that work in them. 

In between the administration building, the OR, lab, and the driveway to the hospital is this small area under a tree, built up by brick and hidden by some plants.  These plants are in bloom, some of them with tropical flowers.  Others are just snake plants.  Lizards run around back here and the chicken, affectionately named LUPPER ('cause he's gonna be one soon!) seems to hang out back here too.  Trash seems to migrate here, as well.  I found it when  while I was looking for a quiet place to eat.  Sacked out back there, with my water and notebook, it's not post-earthquake Haiti anymore.  It is my sanctuary.

Locals wander through here, laughing and singing, always talking cheerfully.  The team (those that have remained) also finds the place ripe for laughing and hanging out.  Gina and I eat lunch back here.  Jerome and Billy tell transport stories bqck here.  We've enjoyed the Haitian beer back here.  We eat our rice and beans here, drink our water here, try hard not to gag at the smells around us back here.  This place, the picnic table, is where I find peace down here.

There is no year-old dying from a simple surgery here.  No multiple unsuccessful IV attempts here.  No family member asking for food here (although I did give my meals away and drank water only here today).  No IVs run dry here.  No antibiotics are skipped here.  No language barriers here.  No cholera here.  No intermittent ANYTHING here.

And I flew all this way and found peace....at a picnic table.

Haiti Day 2- Keeping an eye on things....

A little girl comes into the ER (which is funny just to call this room here an ER.  Just sayin'.....) and she has a disfiguring eye injury of some kind.  It's hard to tell, at first glance, if the globe of the eye has been destroyed, if this "eye" is infected, whatever it is.... Dr. Ed speaks with the family and assesses the patient.  He determines a number of things......

1-  There are three interviews necessary for all admissions.  The first one is total bullshit.  Nothing mentioned in this first interview is valid, EVER!  For instance.... The eye is infected and has a been for a week.  The second interview has a few nuggets of truth to it.  Maybe there is an eye injury here after all.  She HAS injured it in the past.,.... A-HA!!!  A nugget of something valuable!  And the third is nothing but truth.  The first two stories are mostly fabrication or outright lies, but the third interview is nothing but truth and might, in no way, resemble either of the first two stories AT ALL!!!  Also for instance....this little girl had an eye injury A YEAR AGO!  She recently broke her prosthetic eye.... See? 

2-  She did, in fact, injure her eye.  The prosthetic eye was produced and placed on the table.  POOF!  There it was, right on the desk.  A beautiful brown eye. 

The little girl ultimately was discharged the next day after determining that she had an infection.  The broken prosthetic eye, however, was not discharged with her.  It stayed on the desk at the nurse station for the remainder of the time that we were in Haiti.  Every person that saw this eye on the desk picked it up and admired it...."I wonder what this here eye is doing here right now?"  Really? 

Sadly, when Ed said that he was going to put his feet up for a little bit and to keep an eye on his patients, he really meant it....

Haiti---the first 24 hours

What a whirlwind 24 hours getting to Haiti was!

Overslept in the morning, literallyt ran out of the hotel to the shuttle, leapt out of the shuttle at the airport, ran through bag check with handlers throwing our luggage on the rack without even weighing it (What a GREAT way to avoid overweight fees when you wait until the last minute!!), sprinted through security and the terminal to get to the gate to......sit for 20 minutes before boarding!  HA!!  That's what happens when you oversleep!

There are roughly 50 (maybe?) people here in the lobby, all wearing the colorful green wristbands that identify us as Project Medishare volunteers.  They are not panting and sweating like Gina and I are, but we're all the same here.  Doctors, nurses, therapists, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, lab techs.....all of us heading to Bernard Mevs in Port-au-Prince.  Seems like a great group of people at first glance.  LOTS of people holding their pillows, though.  Never thought to bring one.... maybe next time!

Th flight down in benign.  Just over an hour long, just enough to remind me that I can't really slkeep on this flight without interuption.  Approaching Port-au-Prince is amazing!  The mountains and the views are stunning, something I paid less attention to last time (from an aisle seat) and you truly have no idea that you're about to land in an earthquake recovery zone.  That all changes REALLY quickly when we hit the ground.  Campas music from several musicians greet all of us.  VERY colorful, lively, spirited music!  So entertaining! 

We wind up getting shuttled to the terminal for customs, baggage claim, and meeting the rest of the handlers.  Fortunately, all of our gear and equipment made it intact, and no bribes paid out to claim anything.  A couple of times we had close calls from a handler that wanted to "help out".  The Medishare locals are quick to squash any "helpers" from coming along and helping themselves.  We take a while to gather all of our gear and walk across the parking area to load our things into a cargo truck.  This is chaotic as children are along the outside of the fence yelling to us for anything....money, water, food....money mostly.  One couple not with us walks to the fence with a fistful of ones and starts handing them out through the fence.  This nearly sets off a riot as more kids rush the fence.  Then the adults storm the fence pushing the kids out of the way to get their money, too.  Later, the couple gets warned about doing that being a HUGE safety issue.  Sure enough, they do it again 5 minutes later!  Surprise for them....when they try it again for a third time, security people have to come by and rescue them!

The drive to Bernard Mevs Hospital is an adventure, like most of driving in Haiti.  The trip to the hospital is a familiar one, along the same filth-covered roads as in March, lined with tent cities, concrete rubble, wild animals, and street vendors.  Traveling these roads is a harrowing experience, but we mke it to the hospital in one piece.

The hospital is like most buildings here....showing the wear and tear survival marks from the earthquake and the toll of the weather and poverty.  Somehow, it meets some of the needs of the people here, and there are success stories that leave here.  A quick glance makes you wonder how true this really is....

There is an announcement that a small group of nurses is needed in st. Marks, devastated by cholera.  Team Canada, with its 7 nurses volunteer for this, encouraged by the beachfront an the prospect of day shift.  Minus these nurses, it is easy for Gina and I to get nights in the PICU/NICU with 2 other nurses.  Jerome and Anne are transport RNs and we become fast friends.  Dr. Ed from Team Canada in the physician-du-jour and our first night promises to be entertaining and quite the learning experience.

Combined, the PICU/NICU holds 20 kids or so.  Hydrocephalus seems to be the hot dx around here, and there is no shortage here.  One kiddo is particularly sick, warranting a lot of attention.  Tonight was an IV skills day...UGH!!!  Not a ton of supplies, and the kiddos here are just as squirmy as in Boston.  Shocker.... The rooms are also filled with family members, camping underneath the beds, propped up in chairs, actively involved in cares.  They are a particularly demonstrative group, these families....praying, singing, praying and singing some more, and after all of that, a bit more singing. 

The haitian nurses work hard here.  I don't know what their role is truly supposed to be.  The expectations here are not like they would be in Boston ot the US.  That being said, they are pleasant and caring, tolerant of the ever-changing supply of volunteers from the US.  I cannot bring myself to criticize their efforts.  As a visitor in their homeland, I cannot fathom what it takes to live, work and survive here.  It is humbling to be here working with them. 

We survive the first night without a whole lot of drama.  One child likely will not survive the day, having barely survived the night.  The next challenge of sleeping during the day is all the more promising thanks to the intermittently running, but cool-when-it-does air conditioning.  I overhear someone actually complain about being cold sleeping during the night.  REALLY??  Who, but an American, would actually complain about being cold IN HAITI!!!  Just sayin'....

Squash soup? In Haiti? Really? Hmmmmm! So gooooooood!

This is gonna be one long week of eating poorly

Arrived in Miami last night and had a nice dinner and chilled out. Then slept well.....TOO WELL! Missed the wake up call! Ugh! Ran thru security. Made it tho...

Video from Haiti-March 2010

Steve Novak made this video of still photos from our trip in March 2010.  Amazing music!

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1219105367605

You need to be logged in to Facebook to see this video. 

READY TO GO!

All packed and ready to go!  Diapers....CHECK!  Formula.....CHECK!  Bubbles, harmonicas, glowbracelets, necklaces and wands.....CHECKCHECKCHECK!!!  Marshmallows?  You betcha! 

Miami tomorrow morning with Gina and then off to Port-au-Prince Saturday morning and Project Medishare!