Happy New Year!
Today started off pretty slow. It's Tuesday, and I guess that means it's their big free market day, so most people were there. Also, tomorrow (New Years Day) also happens to be Haitian Independence Day, which is a big deal. There is lots of pumpkin soup in store for me tomorrow from what I hear. Apparently that's a big thing here in Haiti for Independence Day....so we shall see. They aren't the big orange pumpkins we are used to, but these small greenish ones -- I've never had pumpkin soup....but I like pumpkin pie.....I'm excited to try it. Anywho, between the big free market and the preparations for tomorrow (today at this point), people don't come to the hospital. Sure, we have the ones who have been here receiving treatment, but the nurses pretty much had everything under control and everyone was stable. So, I just kinda chilled out for a while....which was nice given the busy last few days I've had. I decided to go for a run, as I haven't had a chance to really explore yet, and I'm feeling out of shape given that I don't exactly get to go to a gym every day here. I guess Haiti means "the land of many mountains," and it's definitely the case. You can tell you aren't in Illinois flat lands anymore haha, everywhere you look there's a mountain. So I took off outside the complex down the rocky road, passing the concrete structures that are their homes and the truck trailer storage container things that they have converted into small shops. Pretty much every building here is made of concrete....one cause it's stable but also cause it keeps everything at least a little bit cooler. By a little bit, I mean it's still hot and muggy and you pretty much are just in a constant state of sweating.....considering all of you are reading this from Chicago that probably sounds good right about now compared to the probably like 0 degrees and snowing.....but after a few days, cooling off would be nice....after their whole lives they probably don't notice. Anyway, I'm running down the road, with buses, trucks, pick-ups with 20 people in the back, and those crazy motor bikes with like 3 people on the back are flying down the road and zig-zagging around each other. They say in America we drive on the right, in England they drive on the left, and in Haiti they drive wherever is the quickest -- literally, they just don't have any concept of a traffic laws....it's a sight to see. So, I'm braving the dangers of getting run over and running down the street listening to the new Daughtry album (great to listen to English words haha), and it's definitely just absolutely beautiful. I got to one point where there was a path going up the mountain, almost like a goat trail or something (and yes there are goats everywhere, along with dogs, donkeys, roosters, and chickens) and started to trek up that. Got some pretty sweet pics that I'll send you when I'm back. Just beautiful. I wanted to keep going higher but at this point I realized that I was sweating a lot, had no water, and was starting to get tired....it had been about a 35 minute run at this point, and I still gotta run that distance back lol. Tomorrow if I have time I'll try to run down the other way towards where they have the market set up.....I think it's still going on tomorrow or something.
At dinner time (7ish) I was pretty much planning on just eating and then going to the 9:00 to midnight church service to ring in the new year. I ran down to the hospital just to make sure all was quiet, and of course it wasn't. There had just been a huge motor cycle accident and several pretty badly injured people. The medical director saw me and was like "oh thank God, you're just in time." He was planning on going home at this point as he had been there all day, so he was grateful to pass the baton to me. He wrote the prescriptions for the patient's families to go and get the supplies I needed, and the nurses started prepping for me. He was pretty much like, "you got this," and he left. It's funny how at this point they pretty much trust me with whatever. The nurses all were getting ready to stitch up this lady's leg and I walked over, looked at it, and told them that no, suturing wasn't necessary, we could just bandage it up as it wasn't deep enough for stitches (it was more like just chunks of the skin were out). They were all like, oh ok, you're the doctor. When the other doctor came in later and saw, she was relieved that I didn't stitch it.....so I guess I'm getting the hang of some of this. That same lady had a nice laceration along side the inside of her bottom lip. Now, I've worked with an oral surgeon before.....but I just suctioned blood as he did all the hard work.....but I realized as I started to clean this lady's lip that working inside of mouths is tough work....for one she kept yanking her head away every time I touched it. Then the other doc recommended soaking the gauze I was cleaning with in Lidocaine first to get some topical numbing going on....that helped quite a bit. I'll remember to do that next time. The doc kept saying, "Aaron, you are a criminal, you're so mean!" As she laughed cause all the patients in the room were in so much pain and there I was making everything momentarily worse by squirting betadine into their wounds. I offered to let her take over, but she said she preferred that the patient's kept liking her for the moment. Anyway, stitching up her lip proved to be just as difficult, and not until I was done, doing individual stitches as we do on most wounds, did the doc say that for mouth wounds a running stitch is just fine. No biggie, just woulda made it about 5 minutes quicker for me. Good to know as well for the future. Another guy had a broken left arm with lots of surface wounds, so we pretty much just cleaned it, wrapped it with a ton of gauze, then some ace bandages, and put it in a splint.....pumped him with some fluids. I'm still not sure what we are gonna do for him beyond that. Can't exactly x-ray it to see how bad it is.....but it's clearly broken.....I think they may send him to the bigger hospital once he's more stabilized. Right as we were finishing up all this, two more guys came in that had some sort of head on collision on their motor bikes. The one guy was wearing a helmet and only had some cuts and abrasions on his hands and back. The other guy had this huge spidering slice in the back of his head, along with multiple other wounds. I looked at them both, pointed to the helmet, and gave the guy who had it a thumbs up. He smiled, and the other guy just shook his head. Sounded it like it was the helmet dudes fault that the accident happened, and he felt pretty bad....I think he paid for the other guy's supplies too. I helped as Dr. Josef stitched up his head as it took quite a bit to hold him down and keep the wound closed as she was stitching. He was howling and screaming the whole time.....and I felt bad for him cause he did have like a 4 inch slice in the back of his head. I laughed then when I started cleaning his ankle and back (minor abrasions) and he screamed just as much. I was like, "dude, I just fixed a hole in your head, seriously this can't be that bad!" All the nurses were laughing at this point cause it def seemed out of proportion to his prior injury. By the time we finished fixing up all the injured people from the accidents, I looked at my watch and it was 12:03 -- gotta say, what a great way to bring in the New Year though....fixing up people, arms deep into the blood and guts (slight exaggeration haha)....I was sad that I missed the service, but this was obviously more important.
Dr. Josef asked if I had decided to just stay in Haiti, and I told her that no I have to leave on Friday back to Port-au-Prince -- to which she said she was very sad....I have become their friend and they like having me there to help. She wanted to know if I would ever return, and I told her yes, I hope and plan to, potentially with others as well. She was very happy about that. It is pretty cool to see how everyone reacts to me now when I'm down in the hospital. A few times some patients have needed stuff and she told me to just write the prescriptions....when the nurses looked at them they were like, who is this? She told them, oh it's Dr. Aaron....and they all smile and go fill the prescription. Now when there's emergencies and I'm there, like tonight, they almost defer to having me fix things up and they start prepping to assist me. They are usually pretty quick to start the IVs, so I haven't gotten a lot of practice with that....but that's okay, I can't do it all. Today, one of the guys that mans the front door (almost like a security guard) asked what my cell phone number was so he could call me if there was an emergency. I told him that my phone only worked in America, so it wouldn't work.....just come upstairs and find me if he needed me. I'm definitely still learning a ton, and each time I've fixed someone up I realize a way that I could have done it better, made that stitch a little straighter, a way to do it quicker, make it less painful, etc. But then I think about how I've watched some of the nurses stitch people up, and they don't think too much about scars haha, they just want to get em stitched up and on their way quick so they can help the next bleeding person. Today, when I was stitching the lady's lip, she kept pulling away and screaming how much it hurt. I pointed to my lip, where there resides a scar from when I split it open. I was only 2 years old at the time, and I ran into the corner of a dresser.....tore that thing to as many shredded pieces as you could imagine. They say you remember the most traumatic things in life....and I definitely can account for everything that happened that evening as the ER people said they couldn't help me, and then called in a plastic surgeon who strapped me to a table and started his work. Now, luckily this cut was on the inside of her mouth, and it wasn't as ugly to where a plastic surgeon was needed as far as rebuilding the muscles as well.....but it got the point across to her that I understood that it hurt, and that I would do my best to fix her up quick and as painless as possible. After I showed her, it def calmed her down a bit.
We'll see what tomorrow holds. In general, should be another quiet day in the hospital as most people will be celebrating the new year and Haitian independence....eating all of their pumpkin soup -- I hear people sometimes get sick from eating too much, so maybe I'll be treating some stomach aches haha. But, I'm sure there will be some motor bike accidents and the need to fix some more people up. Usually they come in towards the end of the night, cause as I've said they drive absolutely crazy here....and in the dark, with no helmets, it's just a disaster for their heads. I did a quick neuro check on the one guy and it didn't seem like he had any crazy symptoms, but who knows if he had a concussion....I can't imagine how he wouldn't given how hard he must have flown off that bike. Maybe I'll get a chance to check out the market, we'll see. I probably will sleep a bit after breakfast (they seriously don't eat without me, so I have to make sure I'm on time for meals....I felt bad when I didn't show up for dinner the other day and they waited the 2 hours until I got there to eat with me....sure I was fixing people in the ER, but I was like, oh please just eat without me...) and try to rest up for the likely long night ahead of me again. Not sure how long I'll be at the children's home on Thursday, but I'm guessing if there are accidents in the ER I'll be there again Thursday night. Oh, btw, the pregnant woman from yesterday....not entirely sure what happened with her....when I got down there this morning she was gone.....I think that they transferred her to the bigger hospital because they thought it was going to be a complicated birth, so still no Haitian babies at this point. We'll see if one comes in the next two days, otherwise I'll have to wait to get my experience with that part of medicine in the third world until another time (which I'm okay with, I think I could def use some more experience first).
In thinking about the potential to come back here and help out again in the hospital, I'm trying to think of ways that I could serve needs specifically, so that leads into my prayer requests.
Prayer:
- That God would lead me to more specific ways that I could be of service to the people in this area in regards to medical needs that are not currently being met. I think I mentioned but like a doctor is coming in next few months to run an ear clinic for them.....so something that they don't get everyday that would be of use. I'm definitely a big help in their ER, mostly at nights, so maybe something a little more specific that I could do for them during the day so that I'm not just running around trying to see if I can help, sometimes having nothing to do for a few hours. Maybe part of it is that I'm used to never sitting still, so when I have even 2 hours of down time, I'm like itching to go do something -- they are all like, oh good you get to relax for a bit -- I'm like AHHHHHH!!!!!! So, yeah, anyway, I think it would be good for future trips to have more of a set schedule anyway.....maybe something along the lines of traveling out to the areas where people may not be able to come down and get help at the hospital. I tried to ask Minel a bit about it this morning....about villages maybe that don't have their medical needs reached, I'm not sure he entirely got my question, but I know that Bob and Rae had mentioned some villages that are only visited every once in a while, so that may be something to look into.
- Today, just about as soon as I got down to help in the ER, I had the nastiest migraine strike me. I took some Excedrin, but that has done next to nothing and I'm still in a decent amount of pain and pretty nauseous....but hey, God is good and he helped me push through, so thanks for your prayers -- they're helping me have the strength to keep going through it.
- Pray for all of the people that I'm treating. I'm doing the best that I can with the situations presented to me, and we are so very limited with what we can do for them. I trust that we are doing the best possible and without our help, they would have no one, so that is at least a little comforting. Either way, pray for their recovery. Everyone here is pretty dirty with the conditions they live in, so I can only imagine the infections they are likely to get, even with how aggressively I clean their wounds.
Thanks again for reading and for your continued prayers and support. I hope you had a great time celebrating into the New Year! Can't wait to see what God does in 2014 with my medical mission work.....but kick starting it still working in Haiti is a great way to do it!
-Aaron Tabor
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