Sunday 2/14/10
As the sun rose this morning there was one baby being delivered and another on the way. We are blessed to have Josh and Kelly, our emergency room staff, who swept down and delivered the baby smoothly. We spent the day Saturday in Port-Au-Prince making some visits to the hospitals. Bob, Sarah, Larinda and I took a bumpy and dusty drive through the streets of a devastated city. Crumbled buildings, acrid smoke and the smell of sewage reflect the crumpled lives of those around us. Yet, there were hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the streets singing as they grieve their loses.
The resounding resiliency of the Haitian spirit is evident everywhere.
The downtown hospital is overrun but there was nothing we could offer them as most patients are recovering but without places to go. The University of Miami has developed a wound program that is up and running well. The orthopaedic injuries are on their 5th week of healing and either treated with an external fixator, cast or nothing. Our ability to treat these surgically at this point is very limited.
On a different note we were able to see some unexpected joy last night. A mother of a newborn baby has been distraught over her child’s “malformed” foot. Despite the miracle of her delivery she had not smiled since. We told her that the foot she was worried about was normal for the newborn and that her child was in fact beautiful. The nurses came up to me 15 minutes later in tears because the mother had smiled for the first time.
Simple joys from a complicated situation.
Don
