Roosters crow in the distance, the sky is beginning to turn
pink, and a mother hen and her babies walk by as I sit in front of the
guesthouse on a tropical Sabbath morning.
Soon it will be time to wake up the residents and take them for a run up
the hill. Even in Haiti we try to
respect the ACGME guidelines to make sure they get enough rest. These peaceful moments in the early morning
are one of my favorite. The warm humid
air is reminiscent of our time living here in the West
Indies. Soon music will be
permeating the campus as worshipers enthusiastically crowd into the local
churches.
As I look over this campus – an oasis in the middle of an
area of urban squalor, I wonder what it would be like if Albert Schweitzer the
well known African missionary doctor were in charge. Dr. Schweitzer was an advocate of preserving
life and protecting nature. He did not
even allow flies to be killed in the dining room or a tree to be cut down in
order to make a new entrance into the hospital.
Here at HAH there has been some new construction and some improvements but
the deforestation of banana trees in the front corner of the campus has made
visible all the trash that did not get hauled away with the foliage and now one
looks out to the block wall topped off with razor wire. It is a scenario representative of many
processes here. Nonetheless work is
being done…
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| Kids Sabbath School at church next door |
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| Dr. Ian Alexander |
On a brighter note patients are still arriving from near and
far for some of the most sophisticated orthopaedic operations in the country. Perhaps to the people in Haiti we are analogous to a Cleveland Clinic or Baltimore International Center
for Limb Lengthening. Dr. Ian Alexander,
an internationally recognized foot and ankle surgeon joined me this week, in
addition to Dr. Sull, resident from Loma Linda, and Dr. Nepple, resident from Washington University
in St. Louis. Dr. Alexander said he came to learn more
about pediatric orthopaedics, but all the rest of us learned far more from his
breadth of knowledge and surgical expertise.
We even had a a little extra time for a world class lecture on foot and
ankle surgery after finishing surgery on Thursday evening. This was followed by an excellent spaghetti
dinner made by Lucia and Maria.
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| Kati recovering from surgery (see previous post) |
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| Wilner after surgery and before |
Tim Gerke and his
two friends Leah and Andrew were a great help in our operating and recovery
room. Tim and Leah are ICU nurses in Portland. While in between hospital duties they were
busy running back and forth to local orphanages, buying food, supervising
construction projects and hugging kids.
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| Tim, Leah and Roosevelt at orphanage |
Many of our patients with the most severe deformities are
treated with external fixators which in many cases can be programmed with
special software to do gradual corrections.
Gradual correction of severe deformity permits safer, less invasive
surgery and is often times less painful.
This has a lot of advantages however does require close patient follow
up and these operations really are not “over” until the correction is
completely corrected weeks to months later.
We did a lot of follow up and fine tuning on cases from our previous trip
as well as some checking on expertly performed cases from the Team Sinai trip
last month headed up by John and Merrill Herzenberg. It has been incredible to have surgeons like
John come down and put their vast experience at work on exotic and difficult
problems. The most incredible part is the lives that are changed by these
operations.
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| View from top of ridge |
The week was finished off by a motorcycle ride through
Carrefour and up to the top of the ridge.
Some think I tolerate risk, but Dr. Alexander asked if he could go along
with me on the back, superseding any risk that I would likely have taken. Being the driver was enough for me. To put it in modest terms the road is a
rutted, steep track up the hill with loose softball sized rocks covering much
of it. Anyhow we survived the trip
unharmed, with appreciation for God’s grace and the $2 a day travelers
insurance policy from AHI.
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