Yesterday I flew to Port-au Prince along with a team of medical doctors from the University of Miami. As the sun set and we made our descent, I asked the physician on the plane with the most experience working in Haiti, Dr. John MacDonald, what to expect.
“Expect Gettysburg,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Expect Gettysburg,” he repeated. “You know, the kind of medicine they practiced in the Civil War.”
Once I arrived, I saw what MacDonald meant.
While doctors here aren’t anesthetizing patients with liquor the way they did in the Civil War, the care at the makeshift hospital I’ve been reporting from is certainly rudimentary. An hour ago, I watched University of Miami trauma surgeon Dr. Enrique Ginzburg amputate a woman’s foot without general anesthesia, using only a local anesthetic and sedation. The nurse stood by his side, sterilizing surgical instruments in an open pan of soapy water.
Some 250 severely injured patients have been treated at this facility on the United Nations compound near the airport. Almost all of them have orthopedic injuries and open wounds. In a modern hospital, doctors would do surgery to clean the wounds and give intravenous antibiotics. Here, they receive only oral antibiotics and morphine for the pain.
“This is so frustrating,” MacDonald told me. “I wish we could do more.”
So far, three patients out of the 250 have died, but doctors fear that number could go up dramatically. MacDonald explains it takes about six or seven days after a wound occurs for septicemia to set in – that’s a blood borne infection that can quickly shut down the body’s major organs. It’s been three days since the earthquake happened. The clock is ticking.
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