Dr. Benitez in TU
Take a look at Mark Wood’s column today in the Florida Times-Union about Dr. B’s trip to Haiti. Click here to read the article!
Dr. Benitez Haiti Update #5
Norberto called this morning … which scared me a little because he usually only calls at night. He said that evidently one of the local politicians sent out the word that there were American doctors at the hospital offering free medical care and when they arrived at the hospital this morning there were over 2000 people waiting for them! He said a lot of them are things like, 3 month old scabies cases or a kid that says “my belly hurts” and triage has become a big problem. Every 6th person or so is a serious case but getting to those people has been difficult. They were trying to get some of the local Haitian doctors to help with triage because as they (the American doctors) tell the non-critical cases they won’t be seen they are becoming upset. He said at this point they are basically only working on crowd control. The plan is for them to leave early in the morning to be in Port au Prince first thing and hope to hop a plane, any plane to the States, anywhere in the States. If that fails they will have the driver take them into the Domincan Republic, sleep over night in the capital and try to get a Jet Blue flight out of there Wed. evening. He says they are not telling anyone they are going because they don’t want to incite the crowd anymore than necessary.
Dr. Benitez Haiti Update #4
Just hung up with Norberto and he sounds very deflated. They lost a 4 month old baby today. Brought in by the mother, very sick and so dehydrated they couldn’t start the IV. They took her into surgery to do a “cut down” (which is basically surgically opening a area to make sticking the needle in the vein more accesible). During the cut down procedure she crashed and he said four doctors worked on her before pronouncing her dead. He said the other docs were telling him, since he was the peds, it was his call to stop the code and finally after 45 minutes he did. It was then up to him to tell the mom. It has been a long time since he has been in that position, and I can imagine it gets harder with age. Then to make matters worse, as they were cleaning up the bed, a retired anesthesiologist got stuck with one of the used needles. They did a “quick test” (they had available at the hospital) on the mother and postmortem on the baby and determined they were both positive for AIDS. He said they called an Infectious Disease doctor in the States using the satellite phone and were able to start the doctor on some medicine that has been shown to greatly decrease the probability of her getting AIDS. He said there is a kit in the hospitals, put there by PIH (partners in health, an international medical missionary group) that has the meds for just this type of thing. They say that there is only a 3% chance that a doctor will get AIDS from a contaminated stick and this medicine drops that 3% by 70% so they are all feeling good about that …. but still …. very scary stuff. He went on to say that he saw 62 patients today and the group saw 200. He finished by saying “we are all doing OK, we feel good about what we are doing and we’ve been able to help a lot of people”. It sounded like he was telling himself more than me …. In re: to the flights. They think they have something out of the Dominican Republic on “tues or wed.” (which doesn’t sound very definite to me!). It will be a 12 hour drive but that is a lead they are working on. Please continue to pray for him and Papo and all the workers there, that they help as many as they can and then come home ~