Divine Timing

Hungry For Life - Medical Team Blog:

The team ended clinic with a bang, or should I say Kaboom! When we walked up to the clinic this morning we envisioned 90 patients to help, turning off the lights at 4:00 pm and maybe a quick walk to the beach…but soon reality hit and at 6:45 we trudged our wear souls up to the guesthouse after having seen 170ish patients. We are tired but have a feeling of great accomplishment that comes from hard work and a job well done.

Again, interesting and curious pathology cases made its way through the doors of the doctors today. A 25 year old who came in because of a sore on her chin. Upon further investigation she regularly has boil like sores break out on her body and then heal over, and a necrotic kidney that needs to be removed and osteomyelitis (infection in the bone)with significant bone deterioration. At home she would be hospitalized immediately, here we had no option but to send her home, come back tomorrow for IV therapy and then hopefully we can have her meet up with a surgical team North of Port au Prince (the nation’s capital) for surgery. She is just one of many strange and peculiar medical disorders this group has treated today and over the last 10 clinic days. In total, our group helped approximately 1500 patients to better health and wellbeing.

Jumping back to yesterday, while most of us rested from the previous 6 days of work, Brian was the hero of the day. Long story short, throughout our two weeks in Haiti we identified approximately 12 people that were in urgent need of surgery. This is often the case but specialty medical services are not readily available in Haiti and can be quite costly, and when the team leaves a lot of the people are left without follow-up care despite the best efforts of our amazing Haitian team. By divine timing, we found out that our team has overlapped with a surgical team from the US, working approximately 4 hrs north of our location. This amazing gracious team Grace4Haiti, lead by an incredible woman Jennifer from Missoula agreed to collaborate with us and allowed our surgical patients to come and receive care. With a day and a half notice, we were able to mobilize the patients and a transport (not and easy feat) up to St. Marc. Superhero Brian woke at 2:45 to chaperone this group. 18 people stuffed inside a van, so stuffed that the side door would latch closed, and traveled across the country side and were welcomed by this amazing surgical team, who on their day off, decided to get to work and started intake, assessment and surgery that day. Brian rolled back into Grand Goave, a bit battle weary but with a huge grin on his face, full of stories of his great adventure. We really feel like this was a gift from God to be able to follow through for these beautiful people of Haiti who are in so much need.

Tomorrow we will clean up the clinic and head to Port au Prince to start our journey home. Haiti, a beautiful land of contrast and mystery; forever burned in our hearts.