February 28, 2010

  • Haiti update #6 from Juantia

      Sun, Feb 28, 2010

    How can it be Friday already?? Where did the week go? It's kind of amazing how the week can seem to fly by! People come and go, and things change at Delma 33, yet the basic workings stay the same.
       It's been a good and interesting week... particularly today. But let's start with earlier in the week. I don't remember what days some of these things happened on....
       I worked in our "ER" one day and packed and changed the dressing on three abscesses. It seems like we see a pretty good share of abscesses. It seems like people don't take care of injuries that they get, and then they get abscessed.
       The other day we had some US army guys (82nd Airborne) come to Delma 33 wanting in to see what we're doing. I think they were going around and looking at medical places and taking notes on what they were doing. Well, the Merlin group at Delma 33 has a no guns policy, and these guys were, of course, toting guns. So one of the in charge Merlin people told them that they were welcome to come and see but they weren't allowed to bring their guns. That didn't work; they weren't giving up their guns, so they weren't allowed to come in, so they didn't. I found out about that at the end of the day on the truck ride home.
       Maybe I know, in a very small degree, what Toni's (the charge nurse where I work at home) job is like. We have two relatively new (to Delma 33) nurses. So today it seemed like I did a fair amount of question answering and order reading, but I enjoyed it. God is definitely helping me! Maybe I'll be better at reading the famous doctor scrawl when I get home. :) They're not all bad.
       After the earthquake, some of the Haitians were taken to the Dominican Replublic to hospitals over there to be treated. IFM has a van converted into an "ambulance". They've been using that to bring Haitians back from the Dominican from the hospital. Haitians and Dominicans don't like each other, and it seems like the Dominicans are getting tired of the Haitians and want them to go back to Haiti where they came from. It's so sad, some of the Haitians are still in bad shape from the earthquake, but here they are at this hospital, and they keep telling them tomorrow they'll operate- tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. 
       Last night, Ezekiel, one of the Haitian guys that helps out at IFM, brought some more patients back from the hospital. They were both women, and they both had x-rays with them. Jordon, one of the German Baptist docs, looked at the x-rays. Some of us others looked at them too. The one lady had a broken pelvis, and the other had a broken arm and leg. The pelvis looked like it was healing at least somewhat, the arm had a rod in it, Jordon said, and the leg had an external fixator on it. It's pins that go into the bone on both sides of the break, and the pins come out through the skin and are attached by a bar. We took the pelvis x-rays to Delma 33 today, but sent the lady on home last night. Jordon thought that they probably wouldn't do anything more about the pelvis at Delma 33, and he was right. The lady with the broken arm and leg slept here at IFM in the main house on the couch in the living room/kitchen. The plan was to take her with us to Delma 33 in the morning. She hadn't had any pain medication for four days because the hospital was out. We gave her Ibuprofen and Tylenol PM, and then during the night one of the nurses that's staying in the main house got up and checked on her and gave her more Ibuprofen. 
       So this morning she was going to go to Delma 33 in the ambulance, but we would still go in the truck. Lori, an RN from Indiana, and I rode with her in the ambulance and Ezekiel drove. We have her a shot for the pain before we left, which it ended up being longer before we left than we thought. I guess I was getting used to things being done in American time rather than Haitian time. It seems that time to Haitians isn't a very big deal. Anyway, we were finally on the way. Sometime during the trip, we decided to give her some Ibuprofen and hopefully take some of the edge off of her pain. Ibuprofen seems rather insignificant for that, but you have to work with what you have at the time. 
       The guy that was with her knew some English. He told us that she had chest pain. A lot of Haitians, it seems, have heartburn, so when he told us that, I figured that's probably what it was. We had given her Ibuprofen, and she was laying down. So between my little bit of Creol and his little bit of English, we discovered that yes, she had acid. That's what they call it. Lori had some peanut butter crackers in her bag, so we dug them out and gave her one. She didn't seem to like the peanut butter (Haitian peanut butter is spicy), so Lori scraped the peanut butter off of the crackers and we gave her the crackers. It seemed to help.
       Ezekiel had the siren on in town, but it didn't seem to do much of anything. It's kind of a funny siren. It seemed to help some, but NOT like it does with ambulances at home, although we did have two UN vehicles wave us around to pass them. Traffic was bad, so we went to take a different route... that road was BAD. It wasn't paved, and it was rocky. Sigh! I went to the foot of the stretcher and help her foot still so her leg wouldn't move so much. And Lori and I sang some songs. We sang a couple of short songs, and before I knew it, she was resting. She even had her eyes closed!
       I braced her foot for the rest of the way to Delma 33 (even though we did turn around and got off the awful road). And when we got to Delma 33 things were kind of caotic in the "ER". They had been short two nurses for a little. Lori and I didn't think we'd get there that late. And I was the one that was designated for the "ER" today, but they managed without me. Cheryl, another one of the nurses that has been in and out for a while, was working in the "ER", so she just stayed back there and I went up to the clinic part. The two "new" nurses were working up there, but right in the morning it's usually slower; they were handling it fine then; it was later that the questions came. :)
       So our lady that we brought to Delma 33 was admitted. She's to have surgery I think maybe tomorrow. She has infection in the arm that was broken. They're going to have to do skin graft, they're thinking. The leg is doing well, which is a blessing. 
       And now I really must get to bed and finish this later, because I'm not done, but it's LATE. At least tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday, Lord willing, is our day off! I'll try to get this off tomorrow... good night!

       Ok, so now it's Sunday. I couldn't get on the internet yesterday... it wasn't behaving. :)
       This past Monday morning, early in the morning, there was another tremor. It was a 4 point something. I didn't wake up for that one. I heard about it the next day. One of the Haitian interpreters at Delma 33 told me that 14 people were killed in that tremor. Tuesday morning, however, I did feel it. It was another 4 point something, but I'm not sure if I felt that one or if it was a tremor afterward. I woke up and heard rattling (I think it was our locked gate shaking) and my bed started shaking. I got up and looked at the clock in the kitchen. I thought it said 2:30 AM, but now I don't know because the tremor was at 1:20 and then there was another shake at 1:36 AM. I don't know, I did feel two, but the second one was slight compared to what I have felt in my short experience here. 
       Yesterday I worked in the "ER" again. The nurse from IFM that usually works there took a day off. It was so neat, we "discharged" three skin graft patients. They would come to have the dressing changed/looked at, and yesterday we gave them some lotion to put on and told them that they don't need to come back unless they have problems. The one little girl I had seen the day that she came in and was told that she needed a skin graft. That day, I temporarily covered the area until she would get the graft done, and then yesterday, God allowed me to see the end result! PTL!
       We took another "tour" of Port Au Prince yesterday for some of the medical team that hadn't seen it yet. (I just heard some rumbling, so I stopped typing to see if the house would start shaking, but it didn't. Maybe it was just a vehicle on the road; I don't know.) It's become a tradition to give all the different medical teams that come a "tour" before they leave. This was my fourth "tour". This time I found myself looking at and thinking about the people that we passed more than before. People going on with life, people digging through rubble, people sitting around. The air was so think with dirt some places, that my eyes would fill with grit and it felt sort of thick when I blinked my eyes. There was also smoke in the air some places. And on top of that, it was overcast yesterday, making a grim picture. We went places that I hadn't been before. At one point we had to back out of the street we had just turned on because there were piles of garbage/junk on the road and there were people. I think we could've if we would've need to, but we didn't.
       Please continue to pray for the people of Haiti. Pray that the lives that were dedicated and rededicated to Jesus through all of this would remain faithful to the end. Pray for me as I finish up here and say goodbye to Haitians and Americans and Canadians that I'm going to be leaving behind when I leave on Wednesday, Lord willing. The plan is that my last day is on Tuesday, leave here Wednesday afternoon with another group of people, head to the Dominican Republic for overnight, and catch my flight out of Santo Domingo on Thursday afternoon. 
       I hope to write one more email before I leave. Thanks so much for your prayers and keep praying! The battle's not over!   Because of Him, Juanita