On January 12, 2010, a catastrophic magnitude 7 earthquake hit the impoverished country of Haiti. An estimated 3 million people were affected, and the Haitian Government reported that an estimated 230,000 people died, 300,000 were injured and 1 million were made homeless. They also estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged. In an instant, life there had been reduced to rubble and the world responded immediately to the country’s desperate need for food, water, shelter and medical care.
Medical professionals, missionary groups and caring individuals joined forces to respond to the disaster, including dozens of doctors, nurses and physical therapists from the greater Chattanooga area medical community. Even before the disaster, Haiti had a weak health care system. With an appalling lack of medical equipment and supplies, medical volunteers were called to perform surgeries in the crudest of circumstances, with marginal radiology support, limited surgical tools, and using the most basic techniques.
HealthScope magazine honors the medical professionals who offered their time and expertise in response to Haiti’s tragedy – they are shining examples of bravery and compassion in the face of disaster. Here we profile a few of these hometown heroes.
Dr. DeAnn Champion
“The utter poverty was overwhelming,” says Dr. DeAnn Champion, an emergency medicine physician at Memorial Hospital. “But they were the cleanest people you will ever meet. Their clothes were pristine and they never smelled bad, yet there was no hot water or laundry facilities.”
As a member of the Tennessee-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team (TN-1 DMAT), Champion was deployed to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince just weeks after the earthquake.
“The people were appreciative, humble and stoic,” Champion remembers. “One young woman had lost her sister to the quake and was bravely shouldering responsibility for the surviving 5-month-old baby, along with six other children, while she lived on the street.”
Dr. Eric Clarke
“Our operating room had a rusty table that didn’t move and an anesthesia machine that didn’t work,” says Dr. Eric Clarke, an orthopedic surgeon with Scenic City Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. “During open surgeries we had to hold the broken bones together with our hands.”
Clarke traveled to the heart of the disaster zone with the Haiti Christian Development Fund. While there, he fixed fractures and provided wound care with orthopedic surgeons from Germany and Oregon. Thanks to Parkridge Medical Center, as well as Walker Baptist Medical Center and Alabama Outpatient Surgery Center in Jasper, Ala., doctors had some of the much-needed supplies.
June Hanks, Ph.D., P.T.
As thousands of Haitians deal with injuries and amputations, there is already a rehabilitation clinic established there by Chattanooga physical therapist June Hanks. Hanks started the Advantage Haiti program in 2001, and on a recent trip she took a team of physical therapists and a prosthetist/orthotist to make artificial limbs and leg braces.
Post-earthquake victims are being taught to manage their new disabilities and, if necessary, being prepared for prosthetic or orthotic devices. One of the group’s youngest patients was a 5-year-old girl with a below-knee amputation, and one of their oldest patients was an 80-year-old man with an above-knee amputation.
The Advantage Haiti program will teach thousands of newly disabled Haitians how to find their way back to functional living and potential employment, which will help the rebuilding process for the local economy.
Ethan Hix, CRNA
Ethan Hix, CRNA, joined a team from Hope International and took suitcases stuffed with 280 pounds of medical supplies donated by Hutcheson Medical Center. In Fort-Liberté, Haiti, the group turned a school into a hospital, treating 900 patients in one week. The medical team there had to carry out many amputations.
“Some people had no medical attention since they had been injured weeks before and their wounds were infested with maggots,” Hix recalls. “It was impossible to do anesthesia the normal way without oxygen or monitors, so we literal kept our finger on the patient’s pulse or held a palm close to their mouth to check their breathing.”
Dr. Patrick Keegan
“Medical supplies kept pouring in, but there was no place to store anything because most of the buildings had been destroyed,” recalls Dr. Patrick Keegan, a pediatrician in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at T.C. Thompson Children’s Hospital. “The packages came from all around the world, but you didn’t know what was inside them because they were labeled in Italian or Japanese or German.”
Joining Keegan were two pediatric intensive care registered nurses from T.C. Thompson Children’s Hospital, Barbara Rhyne and Rhesa Rodriguez. The group went to Haiti with logistical support from Global Outreach International. Transportation and supplies were provided by private donations through Erlanger Medical Center.
“Fortunately, I speak French and Creole,” Keegan says. “But as a pediatrician, I know that kids are the group least likely to be adequately cared for in this sort of a disaster.”
Together, the three of them were persistent in finding the supplies they needed to establish a newborn nursery, a neonatal/pediatric ICU, an acute care pediatric ward, and a pediatric emergency room. With no IV poles, limited oxygen and only one ventilator for over 600 patients, they say they were fortunate to have special monitoring devices provided by Erlanger Medical Center and donated medications from Moore & King Pharmacy in Chattanooga.
Dr. Phyllis Miller
“I knew it was a poor country with massive devastation, but to see it with my own eyes was gut-wrenching,” says Dr. Phyllis Miller, an obstetrician/gynecologist with the Women’s Institute for Specialized Health. “I delivered one baby at night by flashlight to a family who already had two small children and they were living under a tarp. Formula was scarce and babies had to survive entirely on breast milk.”
Miller was with one of two teams that left Chattanooga in support of the Children’s Nutrition Program of Haiti, started several years ago by Dr. Mitch Mutter, a cardiologist at the Chattanooga Heart Institute.
Their “hospital” was the dorm of a former nursing school in a small town near Port-au-Prince that was 85 percent destroyed. For seven days, Miller worked long hours delivering babies, performing basic gynecological surgeries, and providing women’s health care.
“Other physicians were doing skin grafts and wound care, and we were all amazed that the patients were out the door almost immediately,” Miller remembers. “They managed much higher levels of pain than we do in this country, with only Tylenol or Advil for pain relief.”
Dr. Rodovaldo Rodriguez
“When the news came out, I just felt like I had to be there,” says Dr. Rodovaldo Rodriguez, a surgical specialist with North Georgia Surgery and Comprehensive Breast Center. “I took two suitcases full of medical supplies, including dressings, bandages, saline and medical kits, plus a bunch of medications donated by Hamilton Health System.”
Rodriguez and several colleagues from Dalton, Ga., joined Project Haiti Heart and landed in Fonds Parisiens, just 30 miles east of Port-au-Prince, within a few weeks of the earthquake. Rodriguez says they treated nearly 500 patients each day, mostly providing wound care, field triage and general medical care for tuberculosis, diabetes and dehydration
Rodriquez says he was amazed at the strength and endurance of the Haitian people: “We saw rows and rows of beds with people who had survived being crushed under concrete slabs and had amputations on at least one – and sometimes all four – of their extremities. Many had lost some or all of their family, were living on one meal a day in unspeakable pain, yet they were grateful for a Tylenol and never, ever complained. They do not believe this catastrophe was God’s doing … they have unshakeable faith in the face of unspeakable devastation.”