cholera update and babies

So this past week, we have been working with every donation group under the sun to try and get materials and medication for cholera. Here's what we've got:

• 7 pallets delivered yesterday of meds, IV solution and supplies specifically for cholera
• 2 confirmed 40' containers full of Ringers Lactate IV solution
• 2 more nearly-confirmed 40' containers full of Ringers
• a donation to purchase in Europe all the drugs we'll need to treat cholera for at least 6 months
• a large budget to pay for all expenses of supplies we have to buy in-country
• 2 more 40' containers for general hospital supplies

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I also watched the 'Baseball in the Time of Cholera' movie which was great, I guess it won second place in it's category at Tribeca which is awesome. The movie only solidified my view that even if the UN won't acknowledge that this cholera epidemic is completely their fault, at least they could help pay for some of the treatment. The cost is all falling onto the NGO's shoulders. All of us are extremely tight on budgets espcially in Haiti because there is no more disaster funding, but the UN which has enormous amounts of money, isn't contributing at all. At the very least they could lighten the burden for the humanitarian organizations. At least it would be a step in the right direction, along with compensating all the people that have lost their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children to this disease that hadn't been in Haiti for decades.

Alright, enough ranting.

I finally took pictures up in sal pwason of the kiddos!

Carly and Neika dancing to Lucy's bossa nova music

Nadine- full, happy and swinging to the music

my baby, Marvens

Marvens loving the camera, Neika is over it, and Ferlanda smiling and babbling to the music in the stroller

sleepy girl!

cholera

On Thursday morning, I woke up earlier than normal and decided that I would go to mass. I haven't been in the morning in a long time. I go every Sunday to the evening mass because I don't have to wake up early and it's not a funeral. Every single morning, except on rare occasion, there is a funeral for the children and adults who have died in our hospitals the previous day. Needless to say, it's a depressing way to start the day, but since I hadn't been in a while, I felt it would be good to go.

I walked into the chapel just before Father Rick rang the bell to start. The chapel is shaped like a big oval, with benches around the perimeter and the caskets and guerneys in the middle. There was a large group of foreign doctors there, the majority of our long term volunteers, a couple hospital employees and four family members there to grieve. Father Rick and our absolutely amazing group of singers began with the songs I've gotten to know pretty well. Even though I don't go to the funerals every morning, I hear them on my way to work, we sing them at memorials and other burials and sometimes even at parties. Ok so singing our songs for the dead at parties might be a little inappropriate, but when it's the priest that starts the song... what can you do??  

Father Rick burned the incense and sang our first song and then he went to the pulpit to talk about Gena and Farrah, the two women who lay in front of us. Both of their stories were horribly tragic, Gena was a sixteen year old girl who came to St. Luke so sick that they were unable to save her. Farrah was pregnant, she came to us with a severe case of cholera and between being transferred from St. Damien (because she was pregnant) to St. Philomene (because she had cholera) she died. Her baby didn't survive either. Father Rick continued the mass, leading the group in these gorgeous songs, both in Creole and English and I did my best to hold it together. I thought about that this is not only a loss of human life, but a young expectant mother who died so young, from this brutal disease that only showed up in Haiti a year and a half ago. I left the mass devastated, but with a renewed energy for finding the supplies that our doctors and nurses need to save people from this awful illness.

I've known that the number of patients we're seeing with cholera has been going up and up over the last month. We've doubled if not tripled the amount of Ringers Lactate, the IV solution used to treat cholera, that we're sending to St. Philomene CTC (Cholera Treatment Center). During the dry season the incidence of cholera had gotten so low, I had held on to the hope that cholera wouldn't be so bad this year. Unfortunately, the rains came a little early this year and we're getting a preview into exactly how bad it's going to be. Making matters much worse is that the majority of the organizations in Haiti have left. There two-year disaster funding is up and they are gone or have significantly cut back their programs. Our biggest donor of materials is no longer providing supplies to treat cholera. When I arrived here, each week we were getting at least 2400 bags of Ringers, 1800 IV catheters, hand sanitizer, oral rehydration salts, bleach... everything we needed. Now we are scrambling to keep up with the demand for materials from the CTC and the rainy season has just begun.

A room at St. Philomene, our CTC

Lucxoit and I posing for donor pictures at the CTC pharmacy

That afternoon, Father Rick called an emergency cholera meeting with the heads of the hospital and our supply team, to try and figure out what we can do about the rise in cholera. The doctors started the meeting, confirming that they have been testing the patients arriving with diarrhea and it is indeed cholera. They also said that they have doubled the number of patients in the last two weeks and so we're short on staff and materials. They're afraid that we're going to reach capacity of the CTC, 72 beds, within the next month. The other CTC that was in our area was run by Doctors Without Borders and it's now closed so there are even more people are coming to us. We discussed putting up big tents and treating people outside on cots just to keep up with the number of patients we could soon be getting. Father Rick talked about the need to open a part of our new hospital in Cite Soleil to help with the inundation at St. Philomene. Our doctors and nurses are prepared this time, they talked about how practiced they are at diagnosing the severity of cholera. This time around, they said they're going to do an even better job at gathering patients statistics, to help us know who is coming to us and how we can work to prevent instead of treat.

Yesterday morning, I went down to Cite Soleil with Father Rick to put up fans and lights at St. Mary, our new hospital. The hospital is not yet hooked up to a generator, so we brought a mini one and a lot of extension cords to hook up the fans and lights to equip the area to treat cholera. We came back to the house around lunchtime, I went to work writing emails to anybody and everybody trying to get supplies. Father Rick headed back out to buy cots and put them at St. Mary. While I was down at the hospital, I talked with some of the guys overseeing the building of the hospital who told me about their group Action Chretien. It is an organization of people who grew up in this notoriously bad area who are against the violence and gangs and are trying to help their neighbors. They are the ones who made the plans for the hospital, are overseeing the construction and will manage it's operations. I've only ever been there on Saturdays, but they're all there, working in the hot sun to get this thing up and running. They're doing a phenomenal job and it was cute to see these really rough gangster guys talking about how Father Rick is their savior. The hospital is simple and small, but you look out the window and see that people are living in mucky garbage, in huts made out of sticks and rusted, corrugated sheet metal strewn together with scrap wire. I can see why this project, organized and carried out by the leaders of the neighborhood, is a huge accomplishment and why they are so grateful to Father Rick and St. Luke for their funding.

Driving up the road to St. Mary Hospital

Father Rick putting up fans to prepare for cholera treatment

Looking out the window of St. Mary Hospital

On a separate note, a friend of mine here directed a film that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. It's called Baseball in the Time of Cholera and it has a ton of footage from the tent camp next to our hospital and I actually went to watch one of their baseball practices last week. We got a copy of the DVD, so hopefully I'll get to watch it soon, but you can watch the preview for it at www.baseballinthetimeofcholera.com

our big visitor of the week

Check out the St. Damien blog to see photos from our big visitors tour of the hospital!

http://saintdamienhospital.nph.org/2012/04/19/us-secretary-of-health-kathleen-sebelius-visits-st-damien-hospital/

just another day in the life

i know, i know... it's been forever. life is just too crazy, hectic and not rated PG for me to continue blogging. and i'm lazy.

but here's what happened today:
-went to the adult ER and ICU to collect lists for the materials they need. found out that the number of cholera patients has almost doubled since yesterday. cholera is officially back in full swing now that the rains are here. only this time, there are way fewer NGO's to help give us supplies.

-gave a bunch of meds to help sedate St. Luke ICU's first intubated patient! i think it's very cool that we're providing such a high level of care to our patients. major, major thanks to our awesome doctor-donors in the US for the vecuronium and succinylcholine!

-tried not to cry my way through an exit interview with our communications team. thank goodness i'm not leaving for another 3 months or i would have really lost it. took hilarious pictures with the guys and lucy in the depot.

-went up to the abandoned room to continue the grease-fest photo shoot. got to show off my babies and thought about how little Lubin and Nadine are the only ones still there from when i first went up. Nadine was a tiny preemie when i first met her, now she has braided hair and is crawling and standing up in her crib on her own! Lubin started out too afraid to even walk while holding hands and now he runs down the halls and is having heart surgery in two weeks, si dyevle. (creole for if God wills. live here for 9 months, you'll say it too.)

-ate lunch and listened to a Catholic sister tell me a none-too-PG story about the prostitute she treated that morning. decided that when this becomes a tv show, we better be on HBO.

-dodged a motorcade coming into st. damien's. stuck around to see who the big shots were (father rick even put on a suit!) still haven't quite figured out who it was, i'll let you know when i've confirmed the rumors. in the last two weeks, our assistant director met with Bill Clinton and we got a visit from the President of Mexico and the prime minister-elect of Haiti, so hopefully these guys are gwo chef yo and can get us some awesome aid.

-spent the rest of the afternoon sorting foley catheters... oh the glamorous parts of this job.

-came home to the adorable paper below. stevenson, a 7 year old at FWAL, wrote my name for me. he's completely blind in one eye and see's about 20/100 in the other, so he's never learned his letters. but bridget has been working with him every day, by writing huge letters in marker so that he can see them and learn. he was so proud of his paper that he had to call me on bridget's phone to tell me she was brining the paper home for me :)

-currently writing in my blog to avoid the GRE math section.