February 28, 2010
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Haiti update #4 from Juanita
Thu, Feb 11, 2010
It's nearly 8:00 PM... somewhere someone is playing the keyboard... there's voices and thumps outside my bedroom door in the kitchen/living room. I just turned the ceiling fan on because I was getting warm. The horn honking outside has stopped, but I can still hear vehicles on the road. I'm sitting on my mattress on the floor and emailing. Another day done.
The past two days I've sort of been "training" one of the "new" nurses in. Two LPN's came on Tuesday. Wednesday was their first day of work. They're both older Mennonite ladies. Yesterday I was in post op and today I was out in the outpatient clinic. We just found out a little before we left that the clinic isn't open tomorrow. God is so faithful! We could all use a break except maybe the two nurses that just got here on Tuesday. And we didn't have many, if any, docs to work in the outpatient clinic. One of the RN's who's had lots of experience here in Haiti was working as a doc today, and it was our Irish doc's last day. I don't think they're doing surgeries either. Tomorrow marks a month since the earthquake... wow! How time goes! And we're still seeing and treating earthquake injuries. They're more minor injuries.
One of the things that we've been running into is patient's having no where to go when they're discharged. How do you send someone home when they don't have a home?? And yet we don't have tents to give to everyone; not a fun situation.
Yesterday one of our fighters was getting a blood transfusion when I got there in the morning. He's a young man named Emmanuel, and he was in a house with 15 people, and he's one of the 4 that survived. The docs were trying to save his leg for him, but after multiple times in the theatre (operating room for those of you that forgot
), it was decided that the leg had to come off. I got to see some pictures of the surgery and a video clip from it. Claudine is 14 or so, and she was in school when the earthquake struck. The bones in her right forearm where badly crushed and she had a piece missing from her wrist, so the plastic surgeon had to do a procedure where her arm is sewn to a flap from her stomach for two weeks. After two weeks I think they separate it. Yesterday she went to the theatre to have it looked at. She was still pretty sedated when she came out of surgery, so the nurse that I was "training" and I stayed with her for a little while to make sure that she would breathe. I would gently smack her cheek every now and then or call her name. It was fun to see her gradually coming out of the sedation and responding to me quicker and quicker.
Today I heard a sort of funny conversation. One of the Irish docs was talking to one of the other Irish docs. He had been told to go to the surgical tent about something. Then he asked the other doc what the surgical tent was... he guesses it's the theatre. The one that was asking the question is one of the newer members of Delma 33, so maybe he hadn't heard that before. So not only do we have limited supplies and resources, but sometimes we don't understand the other culture's medical terms, like the vocabulary I gave you in the last email. It makes it interesting.
Oh yes, and the speech accents!Throughout the day I think of things that I want to put in my email, but I forget some of them when the time comes. One of them is our hand washing stations. The first week or two (I'm not sure, maybe more), we had hand sanitzer. But as we kept getting organized and growing, we got hand washing stations with real soap!! You could actually work up a lather!
Yesterday I got a little treat. One of the girls working with IFM came and asked me if I wanted to go with her and another girl to have lunch at a Haitian restraunt. So the three of us left the clinic and walked up the road a bit to the restraunt. It was nice. We had beans, rice, chicken, a boiled plantain, and tampico (a fruit flavored drink).
This past Sunday was our first Sunday to close the clinic and everyone at IFM had the day off. That's the plan now for every Sunday. So on my day off, I got to learn to stitch a cut! I'm so glad I got to learn and do that; I've wanted to for a long time. So that was and is a highlight of my time here. The person came to the mission, and we stitched her up here. It was a machette cut... ON HER HEAD. I don't know the details behind it... I don't know if it was an accident or not. She got seven stitches put in. RN's don't normally stitch in the US, so me and one of the other RN's that never stitched before sewed her up.
So tomorrow, I'm not sure what's happening for us medical people that are here to help with earthquake relief. The thing I do know is nothing early! That didn't seem hard to decide.
We might go and see the IFM clinic and maybe go to one of the tent villages not far down the road from the mission. Thanks for your prayers and continue to pray! I know that God is with me... it's evident that He is! We've been treating LOTS of malaria. I don't think I have even one mosquito bite! PTL! And we've been staying pretty healthy considering. May God be praised! Have a great God filled weekend, juanita
