Among the things that Dr. Tom Lyon, chief of orthopaedic surgery at Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center, brought back to the borough from Haiti was a sense of hope.
Despite the horrific suffering that followed on the heels of the devastating earthquake that struck last month, Lyon – who spent eight days in the country on a medical mission, in company with 20 other medical professionals from the United States – said that he was impressed, not only by the stoic resolution of the Haitian people but by the world’s commitment to aiding the fractured country, which has so little and needs so much.
“There were so many groups and countries there,” stressed Lyon. “People do care.” While, he added, there was immense frustration at the devastation – which occurred “when it seemed like they were just turning a corner” — the support pouring into the country means that, “In a lot of ways, there is a chance to build and start over. That’s what people are looking forward to.”
Operating out of Hospital Eleazar Germaine in Pétion-ville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, Lyon and his colleagues treated a steady stream of injured people, who began making their way up the steep hill on which the facility was perched, once they learned that the clinic – which was largely intact but had been out of service since the earthquake struck – was in business.
Nonetheless, it took an announcement on a local radio station, plus daily visits to a soccer stadium where thousands of the wounded were waiting for care, to bring Lyons and the other members of the team into direct contact with those they had flown to Haiti to help.
The daily routine included a degree of “craziness,” Lyon told this paper, as team members scrambled to get all the necessary equipment and supplies to treat people who, Lyon said, had waited for days with open wounds that were infected. With little alternative, the team did painful procedures with local anesthetics, that were all that was available but which would never have passed muster stateside, Lyon went on.
Then, there were the non-medical complications. The language barrier was significant at times, given the fact that many who came to the small hospital for help feared that they would be subject to an amputation. In addition, while the team was on the ground in Haiti, they experienced an aftershock, Lyon said.
As he wrote in an on-line blog detailing the mission, “I know the building I’m in is built like a rock but kind of hard to sleep after that, in pitch black with all the dogs barking, roosters crowing and mosquitoes all over.”
Overall, said Lyon, the medical establishment in the country was largely “overwhelmed” by the scope of the disaster. For one thing, many of the country’s nurses and doctors had perished in the earthquake, he told this paper. Even at a facility like the Hospital Eleazar Germaine, which was still standing, staff was lacking. With “26 nurses on the schedule, none of them showed up,” he recalled.
This resulted in some juggling by the team, which had been invited to the country and hosted by Dr. Claude Surena, president of the Haitian Medical Association, Lyon said. Indeed, the lack of nurses meant that a four-week-old infant found abandoned at the clinic was taken by the team back to the home where they were staying, each evening, because there was no one with whom to leave him at the clinic at night.
Baby Germaine, as he was named by the team in honor of the hospital where he had been left, quickly became a favorite, Lyon said. “At least four of us wanted to adopt this kid,” he remarked. As of now, it appears that the nurse who found the baby will become his adoptive mother.
Nurturing the infant became one of the most pleasant of the tasks the team members performed each day. “Everyone would take turns feeding him,” Lyon said, noting in his on-line blog, “I … hope to see him sometime soon as he is the promise of a better future for Haiti.”
Also likely to be heading to the U.S. is a patient the team treated, whom they nicknamed “Brooklyn,” Lyon said, because he has relatives in the borough. “I’m pretty sure this guy is going to come and be treated at Lutheran,” Lyon noted.
Much of the team’s time, not surprisingly, was spent cleaning wounds and caring for people who put up with incredible degrees of pain, Lyon said. In all, the team saw more than 1,000 patients and performed 82 surgeries, but – despite the fears of those they treated — did not perform a single amputation, he stressed.
With all that, Lyon and his colleagues had to make do with a shortage of essential supplies, makeshift equipment at times, and old, long-unused equipment that needed prodding in order to be functional.
“The sterilizer looked like something you would boil corn in,” Lyon remarked. “We had to bargain for a hand drill at a hardware store. If one of 20 critical things was missing, we couldn’t operate. But, in the end, we created a system that really worked, and the hospital embraced it.”
So, he added, did the Filipino team that arrived to take over from the U.S. team at Hospital Eleazar Germaine as they were packing up to return to the states at the end of January.
By the time the team that Lyon traveled with was ready to leave, medical supplies and other necessities were flowing more smoothly into Haiti, he noted. When a plane arrived, there would be a lineup of forklifts ready to take the unloaded crates, which made processing each one a matter of minutes.
“Distribution is still an issue,” Lyon added, “but I think it’s getting better.”
Lyon will likely have an opportunity to see firsthand whether his prognostication is correct. While he is back in Brooklyn for now, he is hoping to return to Haiti in two or three months, he said.
He headed to the country in the first place because his skills were greatly needed there, Lyon said. With a sub-specialty of trauma, he stressed, “I knew I could totally help people. I knew it was what I wanted to do.”
To read Lyon’s blog in its entirety, go to http://tinyurl.com/ycbdjgp.