HolyCoast: Is This Haiti 2010 or Gettysberg 1863?
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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Is This Haiti 2010 or Gettysberg 1863?

Based on the description below it's hard to tell whether they're talking about modern era medicine or a field hospital in the Civil War:
Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - In a small stucco pavilion built as a urology clinic -- one of the few buildings in the hospital complex deemed structurally sound -- patient after patient was wheeled into the makeshift operating room on an old bed Saturday. Workers doused the walls with disinfectant as a couple of nurses prepped the wounded and gave them a bit of anesthesia. Then out came the saws.

The work was amputations.

On the grounds of the heavily damaged General Hospital, a mass of injured people, some with crudely severed limbs, moaned or stared vacantly as they waited for care by a team of Haitian and foreign doctors.

Oda Mukkuaka, a Haitian surgeon who has worked at Port-au-Prince's General Hospital for four years, helped guide the saw across the shin of a 40-year-old woman who had lost her foot after she was hit by falling debris.

Using a headlamp like those worn by miners because there was no electricity, surgical scrubs tied around his waist in the heat, Mukkuaka cleared away tissue. Once the cutting was done, he swiftly pushed metal wire into the skin, sewing shut a pocket-like fold to form the end of her stump.

Somewhat remarkably, given the nature of the work and the magnitude of the disaster, Mukkuaka, 35, seemed to take the grueling two-hour surgery in stride.

"We are used to working in a harsh environment because we are in Haiti," he said, citing shortages of supplies and the population's precarious existence. "The difference this time is the volume."
It's hard to imagine this kind of stuff going on in 2010.

1 comment:

Sam L. said...

Haiti's a 4th- or 5th-world country.