News from Dr. Patton

This afternoon I made rounds through the tents with a general surgeon from Martinique. He is an angel! His goal is to help motivate the patients to return to there homes and begin to rebuild rather than remain in a tent on the hospital lawn. Every family and widow responded, “we need a tent to set up on the street outside our house”. They have nowhere to go. Dozens of families. I heard the exact story repeatedly.

The mobile dressing and casting cases I made were wheeled through the camp today to care fore those in the tents.

The surgeon amputated an infected foot.

The Ortho team rode to the hotel where CNN reporters and other VIPs stay in a “top-top”. It’s a pick up with a topper raised by metal bars to allow the passengers to ride in the bed of the pickup, sitting on parallel facing benches yet covered with truck bed topper: top-top. We survived.

I had a wonderful conversation with Andrew Hagland about the story of the first few days of establishing this hospital as the premier medical faciltiy in Haiti post quake.

Scott Nelson arrives tomorrow.