Aloha … from BethC Gifford raises money for March of Dimes
Local health care providers to
share their experiences in Haiti
RANDOLPH, June 2, 2010 – Two Gifford Medical Center health care providers who traveled to Haiti with contingents from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will share their diverse experiences in the earthquake-ravaged country with the public on June 8 beginning at 5:30 p.m. in the hospital’s Conference Center.
Working in coordination with on-the-ground aid organization Partners in Health, pediatrician Dr. Lou DiNicola of Randolph spent a week last month helping Haiti’s youngest patients under a tent in the street serving as the pediatric unit for a hospital in Port-au-Prince.
Emergency Department nurse Carol Rittenhouse of Randolph Center, who also works at Dartmouth, traveled to Haiti in January, just a week following the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated the already impoverished nation.
Working with four of her Dartmouth nursing colleagues in a tent designated the intensive care unit and housing 35 patients at a time, Rittenhouse triaged person after person pulled from the rubble of fallen buildings and dropped off on the grounds of the same crumbling Port-au-Prince hospital.
“The majority of it was crush injuries, amputations and head injuries,” she says.
With no resources, no medical supplies other than what they brought with them and initially no Haitian doctors or nurses to help them, Rittenhouse had to depend on her skills as an emergency nurse, she says.
She sent patients to the operating room to have limbs removed, to the 500-bed U.S.S. Comfort stationed in the bay for critical care and eventually to a hospital that opened at the airport. She saved lives and designated others unable to be saved.
Later some ailments were less urgent, but still problematic for the suffering patients, such as diabetics unable to access needed medications from flatten pharmacies and the onslaught of tetanus.
When Dr. DiNicola arrived in Haiti in May he found less of the chaos and emergent care needs that dominated Rittenhouse’s experience, but just as much destruction, tent cities, growing illness and malnutrition, and a strong sense of appreciation for all that we have – medically – in the United States.
“I don’t think we even come close to appreciating what we have here,” Dr. DiNicola says.
He encountered diseases and conditions that in the United States could have been prevented and/or treated. He rattles some off: gonorrhea eye infections, seizures, severe dehydration, mumps, tetanus, rheumatic fever, typhoid fever, heart failure, malnourished children and premature babies.
Many died in front of Dr. DiNicola and the other American health care workers as they tried to save them. A lack of treatment options, facilities, CT scans, minimal X-rays and lab work, and sometimes no electricity or running water hindered care. Many patients had had conditions go undiagnosed and untreated for years until the only result was death.
“Often what we provided was palliative care,” says the pediatrician, who is accustomed to helping patients, not watching them perish.
The problems, says Dr. DiNicola, existed before the earthquake but are now exacerbated by it.
“The devastation was so far beyond anything I ever expected,” he says.
Amid the sadness, heat and debris, however, were also signs of an incredible people. “I was so impressed with the people who are in such horrible, horrible conditions and still are kind and gentle,” he says.
He recalls one boy in particular. The boy clutched Dr. DiNicola’s hand each time he saw him. One day the boy appeared with two cookies in hand. Food he surely needed. But instead of eating the cookies, the boy broke away from Dr. DiNicola’s warm grasp to give away the food to a homeless amputee huddled under the shade of a single tree.
Those are the experiences Dr. DiNicola says will never leave him.
“I have left Haiti, but Haiti will never leave me,” he says.
Nor will it leave Rittenhouse, who will return on June 10 for another 10-day aid trip with her Dartmouth co-workers. She hopes to maintain a long-lasting relationship with Haiti, helping provide needed health care in the many years of rebuilding to come.
Both Dr. DiNicola and Rittenhouse also hope to keep Haiti in the public conscious by sharing their experiences. They’ll also show photos of the destruction and people they encountered at the June 8 talk, which is free and open to the public. Gifford Medical Center is at 44 S. Main St. in Randolph. Call (802) 728-2284 for more information.