UCLA Operation Haiti

You've read their stories, now hear their voices: Ten volunteers from the UCLA Health System who donated their medical expertise in Haiti talk about their initial shock upon seeing the extraordinary destruction, the rush to provide care to those who had been injured by either the earthquake or by rushed medical treatment, and the heartbreak of working with earthquake orphans.

 

UCLA wound-care specialist Barbara Bates-Jensen volunteered to treat earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince, Haiti for a week. In the 6-minute clip below, recorded both during her time in Haiti and on her return home, she describes what it was like to work in the disarray of an overcrowded tent-hospital, and how she was inspired by her patients and colleagues. Some of video and descriptions are graphic and not for the faint of heart. Bates-Jensen is an associate professor with the UCLA School of Nursing and David Geffen School of Medicine, Division of Geriatrics.

 

 

Sadly, today is our day of departure. Knowing that there is so much more to be done is making today more difficult. Many of the patients have no primary health care. We saw patients with blood pressures as high as 260/140 with no previous diagnosis of hypertension. We were able to provide these patient's with a month's supply of medications, hoping they will find some sort of follow up. We're not sure what the future holds in regards to health care. We can only hope that things improve…

 

We are flying out on a chartered flight sponsored by St. Francis to start our journey home, tired but with a great sense of fulfillment that we helped provide some type of care to more than 1,000 patients in a short amount of time. We're still trying to wrap our heads around the past few days, although we're not sure if it is possible.

 

The devastation of the country and the poverty is unimaginable. The Haitian culture is warm, welcoming and resilient. Almost every patient welcomed us with a smile. It is amazing how the people are able to tell us their story of the earthquake in such a calm voice and then continue on with their day. Our interpreters proved these qualities to us daily, constantly laughing and smiling despite their overwhelming losses.

 

With all of this said, Kerry and I hope to return soon and continue to help this country and its people.

 

 

Today we decided to help serve the community of our host, Kerry Joseph. He had arranged for us to use a cinderblock church that was partially standing in his neighborhood. Again we made a doctor's exam room in the corner with tarps. Between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. we saw approximately 240 patients. After today's clinic, we began running out of essential medications to treat the patients, most of which were donated by St. Francis Medical Center, our wonderful Canadian doctors, Hope Hospital and the storeroom at Quisqueya.

 

We returned to Kerry Joseph's mother's house for dinner again this evening for another great meal.

 

 

Today we set up clinic at a site closer to the compound. It turned out to be a more primitive clinic, near a destroyed town church that some of the Quisqueya teachers once attended.

 

The clinic was in front of a missionary's house. We set up a table for the "duffle bag" pharmacy in the driveway, along with four chairs for triage and the translators.

 

Triage was on the curb, and the exam room was in the corner of the driveway. We set up the exam room out of tarps and four folding chairs pushed together. We were surrounded by flies, naked children playing in the dirt and in the street, and tents inhabited by displaced locals. This neighborhood had a ravine behind it which had been heavily damaged, causing 60,000 people to move to the streets in tents.

After, we had a tour of other parts of the city in the search for beverages. We were able to see huge tent cities where many locals were living, either because they had lost their homes or were afraid to return. Many of our interpreters stated even if their homes were still standing, there was a fear returning indoors. Another said his house was the only one standing in his neighborhood and the smell of corpses and decay was so overwhelming he moved his family to a tent city.

 

Back at Quisqueya we were surprised with live entertainment. Rich, from "Big and Rich," performed for us with a chair and his guitar. Our favorite song was "I need a vacation from my Haitian vacation!" The performance ended with another dose of nightly rain.

 

 

 

 

 

Today, Kerry and I joined our group and piled into a van with six Haitian interpreters. Our driver JoJo is the brother of our Haitian group member, Kerry Joseph. Tightly squeezed into the van, we headed to the orphanage to pick up medications and supplies left over from the group's last trip.

 

Upon getting out of the van, we were tackled by the children. Each of us ended up with at least two kids in our arms.

 

Their main interest was to be held and to view their pictures on the digital cameras. Leaving was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but we knew we were there for another reason.

 

Our next stop was Hospital Espoir, which translates to Hope Hospital. We met with Gladys, who runs the hospital, in hopes of finding a destination for the day. We saw a few patients there and organized our medications, but Gladys had a contact in a more remote area where there had been no medical care. We headed off through the rubble to set up our mobile clinic.

 

We organized our team with two triage nurses, three nurses at the pharmacy, our two doctors in an exam room, our EMT and our paramedic at the wound care station, and our amazing group of interpreters who worked non-stop with us. We saw about 140 patients today, and turned many away, with the promise we would be back tomorrow. Typical complaints we saw today were abdominal pain, rashes, body aches, cough, insomnia, worms, and patients who had ran out of their diabetic and hypertensive medications.

 

After clinic we went to Kerry Joseph's mom's house for dinner. We sat around a few tables under a tarp and ate a meal that had been prepared over a small charcoal fire. Many of Kerry Joseph's extended family members are living amongst the rubble in tents on this lot, along with goats, dogs, cats and no electricity, running water or plumbing.

 

 

Click to enlarge a photo:

 

At the orphanage in Haiti.

Kayla high fives a Haitian orphan while volunteering her medical skills in Haiti.

Kayla with children at the Haitian orphanage.

Kerry and Kayla joined their group at the home of their Haitian liaison's mother, where she cooked them all dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

For more than a month, Kerry Gold and I had been eager to get to Haiti and thought that we had exhausted all of our resources. On Wednesday, Feb. 24, I received a call from Kerry. She told me there was a group from St. Francis Medical Center, a local hospital, that was planning a second trip to Haiti. We were in.

 

First thing next morning we contacted our boss, Janet Rimicci, at Ronald Reagan UCLA (RRUCLA) Medical Center where we both works as nurses in the emergency room, to ask Janet if she would approve our time off and allow to us finally go to Haiti. Janet, who had been more than supportive of our efforts to go to Haiti quickly, gave us the green flag.

 

 

 

Four days after we found out we were going, Kerry and I arrived at the Los Angeles airport around 7 p.m. to catch a red-eye flight to Miami, one of our first stops on our way to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This is where we first met the other eight members of our team:

After a long day of travel, we arrived in Port-au-Prince Monday night. Our first glimpse of Haiti was from a cage on the back of a truck. This was our transportation to Quisqueya, our home for the next week. Quisqueya is a Christian school in Port-au-Prince that was converted to an emergency disaster-relief center. Although dark, we could still see some of the devastation and many tent cities.

 

Upon arrival we set up our tents amongst a small but more organized tent city within the Quisqueya compound. In addition to the tents, other volunteers slept in the classroom floors in sleeping bags, while the military had their own air-conditioned tents. To our surprise and, ah, delight, we were welcomed with cold showers consisting of non-potable water, three minutes each. This was heaven. After a quick shower we fell asleep to the sound of generators rumbling and roosters crowing.

 

 

 

 

UCLA Pediatric Nurse Jessica Kubisch brought these photos back from her time in Haiti, when she served aboard the USNS Comfort hospital ship with other UCLA volunteers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I miss everyone at home, but I wouldn't give up my past week here for the world. It was worth going out of my way to get here. Our help is so needed. Today I stopped counting the days until I was going home, even though the heat and other conditions make it really uncomfortable to work here. I worked the emergency room (ER) Tuesday and Wednesday night. The shift starts at 6 p.m. and you go home drenched in sweat and dirt at 8 a.m. It rained one night and flooded the tents, and the smell of feces and urine is abundant.

 

I don't think there are any reliable, clean ambulances here. The ones they do have are either broken down, minimally modified (regular cars with AMBULANCE written on them) or look like an ambulance, but have no life-saving equipment on board!

 

Mostly, people walk into the ER (emergency room) tent or are brought by family or friends. But about 6:00 the first night, a pickup truck with about eight kids under 30 drove to University Hospital ER (us), honking and screaming. They ran into our ER, grabbed an army-style stretcher and went to get their friend, a 30-year-old catatonic female, who was lying flat in the back of the pickup's open bay. They quickly carried her limp body into ER tent 1. She was unresponsive. I grabbed the defibrillator, clicked on the monitor, paddles to the chest – the monitor of her heart rate stayed flat as Arizona! Apparently she was found more than an hour earlier. By the time her friends could find a pickup truck and contact other friends to help, it was too late. She was long gone.

 

The next night, the Haitian police, with machine guns on their shoulders, drove in through the pouring rain, again in an open-top pickup truck. They also had a person lying down in the back, screaming and yelling, they came in, got the army gurney, placed him on it and brought him inside. At this point I was convinced that an open pickup truck was considered an ambulance. Anyway, this crazy guy, who we had to hold and medicate with antipsychotics, had been shot by what appeared to be a low-power shotgun, and was hit by the pellets primarily left chest/abdomen. I gotta tell you, it was mighty incredible to see, when we held him up and he yelled at us — I did say he was crazy — every hole would squirt out a small stream of blood. Wow.

 

Today I was working dayshift, really cleaning house, the first person in weeks to remove dozens of containers, and restock the ER, Orthopaedics and ICU (intensive care unit) tents and the medication room. It was really great, opening so many boxes, and sorting stuff in this mess of a building run by International Medical Corps called the Ping Pong room (our supplies mostly donated from the US and Canada). While I was running back and forth to and from tents I came across three actual ambulances. I took some photos for you and attached them for your pleasure :-)

 

We could make a killing down here by expanding UCLA's transport team to Port-au-Prince. There is definitely a need, and as long as there is air conditioning in the truck, I am in!

 

In all seriousness, I just find it sad that so many nations give Haiti so much money and the Haitian government can't afford to even employ properly trained first responders with the ability to treat patients.