The Harsh Realities of Haiti: Patients Who've Tugged At My Heart Strings

I've had many questions about the types of patients we are seeing in Haiti, so I thought I'd write a blog about some of the ones who have really tugged at my heart strings.

My first week working as a licensed doctor was spent in Haiti and on my very first day a group of volunteers from MamaBaby Haiti (including a group of midwives) were volunteering at the nearby Hopital St. Francois, a catholic hospital run by our friend Father Geordani.  I felt completely unprepared for what I saw that day without my safety net that I got used to in school of a whole group of students a a doctor working on each case.  One of my first patients that day was a young pregnant mother who resembled a skeleton.  She was brought in because she was having contractions at 34 weeks.  Her eyes were sunken into her head and she didn't have an extra ounce of flesh anywhere on her body.  After questioning her, we discovered that she had been starving herself since she found out she was pregnant because she didn't have a way to feed yet another mouth.  It was finally determined that this woman was not in true labor but was likely contracting due to dehydration.  The nurses gave her an IV and we spoke to her about the possibility of putting her baby up for adoption when the time came.  Eventually the contractions stopped but we have no way of knowing what ended up happening to this suffering mama and her poor baby.

The next little patient is a sweet little baby girl named Sabina Mae. Before she was born her mother had come to see me for a couple of prenatal appointments since we didn't yet have a midwife on staff.  I taught myself how to use a doppler and learned what information I needed to get from these women by looking back at my notes from Obstetrics class and making frantic calls to the midwives on our board.  The day Sabina Mae was to come into this world, was the first anniversary of the earthquake, January 12, 2011.  Her parents showed up at our gate in the morning asking if she could be born at our clinic.  We had a midwife coming in just two days but since neither Sean nor I had ever delivered a baby, we told her we would drive them to the hospital.  Her mother looked so frightened, with blood staining the back of her nightgown, holding onto her husband's arm with each contraction and they were worried about the cost of going to the hospital.  We assured them that we would be able to assist them and that all they had to worry about was getting the baby out safely.  We got them to the hospital and I was planning to stay with them but the staff at the hospital didn't want us to be in the delivery room. So we asked Sabina's parents to call us when they were finished for a ride back to our clinic so she could recover.  After just a few hours we got the call that a new baby had been born safely and that both mom and baby were doing well!  It was a wonderful surprise to me to find out later that her parents wanted me to be her godmother!  This not only meant that I got to choose her name, but would also  be responsible for Sabina if anything was to happen to her parents.  I felt so honored that I started to cry.  I chose Sabina which means "peace" to honor the day she was born and Mae to honor my Great-Aunt Della Mae who had recently passed away.

Marc was about 1.5 years when his mother brought him in to us.  She complained that he was irritable, not walking, had a poor appetite and was losing his hair.  At first glance I would have guessed he was about 8-9 months of age but was shocked to find out he was actually as old as he was.  It turned out he had marasmus which is a condition of gross malnutrition.  He had not been breastfed and had instead been given a mixture of flour and water along with Gerber baby food from 3-4 months of age until the day of his visit.  I had to excuse myself and go have a little cry when his mother told me all of this wondering why someone couldn't have intervened sooner?  Why is it that in Haiti mothers don't have access to good lactation consultants and education about what to feed their children?  After a few minutes of feeling upset and frustrated, I realized that this is exactly why we are in Haiti.  It is still often hard to know that no matter when we arrived here we would have been too late for some but I try to focus on those for whom we've made and will make a difference.  After pulling myself together I went back into the exam room and tried my best to educate his mom about what was going on and how she needed to slowly change his diet to one more appropriate for a 1.5 year old.  We have not see this little guy since this visit but I think of him almost every day and hope he's gaining weight and getting some more balanced nutrition.

Rosenaka on her first visit.

Rosenaka is a 2 year old female who was brought to us by her mother.  At first glance I thought she had been the victim of a burn accident but upon further questioning, we realized that she was suffering from a serious case of Impetigo.  Her mother said they had been to several doctors and she had not had any improvement.  This staph infection covered the majority of her head and face as well as her genitals and it was obvious this child was seriously suffering and had been suffering for a few months.  We prescribed an antibiotic and after 5 visits now, she looks completely normal.  Our next goal with her is to help her to gain some weight and to eat a more balanced diet.

Rosenaka at her most recent visit last week with her mother and Dr. Sean.

Another patient I saw while volunteering at the Hopital Saint Francois was a 12-year old boy was brought in with severe watery, tan-colored diarrhea with mucous, vomiting, leg pain, and lethargy. His eyes were sunken and rolling into the back of his head and all he could do was to lie on the bed.  All of these symptoms pointed to a diagnosis of cholera and we knew we had to act fast.  It's become commonplace to simply diagnose cholera clinically because of the serious lack of access to stool testing, not to mention the lack of time.  It's not unheard of for a patient with cholera to pass away within just 12 hours of the onset of symptoms so if it looks like cholera we treat it like cholera and ask questions later.  For this little guy, he was so dehydrated that we were unable to get an IV into his veins so we decided to rehydrate him rectally and orally.  After watching him for a while we also decided to give him homeopathic aconite because of his shock-like presentation.  The aconite really perked him up and he seemed to get that spark back into his eyes after just a few minutes.  This gave us a lot of comfort but we decided to try to get an IV into his arm again because we knew we weren't out of the woods yet.  Unfortunately it was late in the day and the hospital said we had to send him home (seriously????) so we asked if they would transport him to the cholera ward in Cap in their ambulance.  The response was that the ambulance is not for patients with communicable diseases and he would need to take a taptap. Again seriously???  We knew that we were unable to bring him home with us because at that time we didn't have any resources so we decided to drive him to the cholera ward in our own car where he would receive overnight observation.  I was unable to ride along due to lack of space but I'm told the ward was really a gymnasium with lines strung across the length of the building on which IV lines were hanging.  Connected to the IV lines were 200+ patients, mostly lying on the floor receiving treatment from a completely overwhelmed medical team.  Some of the patients had clearly passed away but the medical staff did not apparently have time to deal with them, they just had to move on and try to help as many people as they could.  I don't know what happened to this little guy but I have hope that he made it.  Cholera in Haiti has been a seriously scary situation, but I'm happy to report that we saw this patient in early November when cholera was relatively new and still on the rise and fortunately the situation has gotten much better in Haiti: daily infections and deaths are considerably lower and many more medical professionals, especially Medecines Sans Frontieres (MSF, better known in the US as Doctors Without Borders) have since arrived to focus primarily on combating this disease.

These are just a few of the several hundred cases we've seen since starting our work in Haiti.  Those several hundred are just several hundred in the pool of millions of Haitians of whom only 1 in 10,000 has access to a doctor.  Please take some time to reflect on this and consider what you can do to change these lives and this country.

Mesi,
Dokte Sarah