Jessica Eddlemon Claridge Reports on Haiti:

“Pa bwe, pa mange a minwit.” If I learn nothing else in Creole, I will at least know how to tell people not to eat or drink anything after midnight because they have “operation deme” (tomorrow). Ha ha, I love my patients though even though we can barely communicate. I have a lot of young girls with broken legs from the earthquake (working on the ortho service). One of them shared her salsa music with me. Another confided how she had a crush on one of the “white men” ha ha. Another keeps begging to braid my hair. It makes it fun when there’s lots to do.

There are some crazy things that walk our halls. A woman comes to the ER for daily dressing changes of the mass that protrudes from the left side of her head – maggots and all. The med students got pimped on the differential diagnosis of a groin mass as we were shown a woman with a baby-head sized ulcerating mass with black material in the middle. The large black spot on her heel gave it away, malignant melanoma. I was stuck down in the OR draining one of the wound vacs. Alex had spent forever assisting in an exploratory laparotomy…why was this little boy’s bowel so infected and destroyed? They patched him up, closed him up, and it wasn’t until anesthesia was waking him up, that I heard an extra loud gurgle from the suction. “Hey Jess, come here.” There Alex stood next to his attending who was holding a very long white wiggling worm with a pair of tweezers. They found nothing during the surgery, but afterward, the worm was sucked out of his throat. Ha, emptying the wound vac was so worth it that night.

Our translators are amazing. They work SO HARD and just get paid with lunch; that’s it as I understand it. I gave the offering call last Sabbath. Cliched, but I talked about being thankful for things we don’t even realize we need to be thankful for…like being able to communicate with each other (very difficult to give discharge instructions to a patient without a translator). As I put $5 in the offering plate, I thought to myself how thankful I was that I even had offering to give. Then I saw one of the translators also put in $5. Oh.

Everyone is pretty open about what happened on January 12. I haven’t met anyone yet that hasn’t lost someone. “Oh yes, I lost 7 family members.” “I have to go home to be with my mom every night because she gets scared to sleep alone.” “Our house is still standing, but we still sleep outside in the tent because it’s too scary.” Most of our translators are highschool or college age boys who would be in school, except for the fact that there is no longer a building. “Oh me? I study economics.” “I study linguistics.” “We were supposed to go back to school today, but people were sleeping in the school tent.” Many of them sleep at the hospital, in the OR, in exam rooms, on the benches. A very sweet nurse took me all around the hospital tonight to look for more prescription pads. She pounded on all the locked clinic and office doors and groggy people would eventually emerge from inside where they had been sleeping. We finally found some in the urology clinic where a very sleepy man had been curled up.

I spent forever developing a pain regimen for my 11 y/o girl that wakes up screaming every night. Nothing seemed to work. Upon further exploration, turns out everyone in her family except her mom died in the earthquake and now she has night terrors.

It’s really hard to discharge patients from the hospital when they have nowhere to go. And those who come from farther away have difficulty getting home because of the gas crisis. We have a few tents left that are able to go to people who meet certain criteria, but that’s not everyone. All the patients and families are friends, which also makes it hard. Why would you want to leave a place that gave you a bed, fellowship, and a free meal every day?

Haitians can sing, and it’s beautiful. I have one girl who hums to herself when she hurts. That’s how I know she needs pain medicine. Another lady wasn’t doing well in the ER and Jen said everyone else in there started singing to her. It’s beautiful.

Connections are being made little by little and it’s very exciting to watch the local staff be proud about various improvements and possibilities. The longer I’m here, the more I see parallels with home. I felt right at home when one of the Haitian doctors started discussing the pros and cons of using a B-blocker in one of my diabetic patients with migraines and hypertension the other night. And at first I was amazed that I didn’t feel tired here, but yup, even here things catch up with you

Food is short, but there is always enough. Not sick yet. Life is good.