Thanks for the experience Floating Doctors!

Pardon the severe delay in getting this blog out, the electricity has been off more frequently and as hard as I try to wake up when it comes on in the middle of the night, my desire for a full night’s sleep wins. This is usually how it goes after we have a bout of the electricity being on more often than not…the next week it is the opposite. This week it has been steadily coming on anywhere between 1am-5am and then remaining off the rest of the day. Bucket showers are actually pretty fun and my Kindle gets 3G internet so I can check my emails. Again, it is difficult for me to drag myself out of bed during the middle of the night to do other power-requiring activities. Anyway, I am up today at 5am just to update everyone on this last week. You are all so welcome… 

On Wednesday I took two of the community volunteers with me to work with a group called Floating Doctors who are stationed (I guess that would be docked) Northwest of here. They travel around providing care for countries all over the world and they have been here in Haiti for a while now. There was one doctor (Dr. Ben) and one Physical Therapist, a Physiotherapist, the community volunteers and our translators. Oh an me too.

 ….OK, the electricity just went off *insert sigh and mild annoyance* so I will continue this then post it later. Damn my need for beauty sleep…

So we all head to this community clinic where we meet with the head nurse who tells us that she was unaware that anyone was coming and that she would have gotten the word out if she had known. Well, it is a good thing that getting patients around here is NEVER (and I mean NEVER) a problem. Dr. Ben asked her kindly to please open the clinic and that he promised people would show up. She then came up with a multitude of other excuses as to why she could not allow us to be there, the last one was that she needed to charge all of the patients 50 gourds for care. The latter being the most important as clinics here still need to make a profit. This is one of the main issues we have run into with the Haitian doctors who work near us as well, they are upset that we are providing free care as this takes away from their profit. I understand this point though I must counter with the fact that most of our patients cannot afford the 50 gourds to see the doctor (about 75 cents) and that this leads to more chronic conditions and increased health risks as the patients do not come to the doctor initially when they are sick, they come in dire situations when they can finally rationalize spending the money to seek care. This was the same if not even more present in the community we were in with Floating Doctors as it is even poorer and more remote. Before I knew it we had decided to hold the clinic in a school house down the road and we begin the trek over with at least one hundred patients who had come to the first clinic. Let it be noted these patients were less than happy with the clinic for trying to charge them for care provided by a non-profit group and they were voicing their opinions loudly the entire way to the next site.

Just as a rolling snowball gathers more and more snow we gathered more and more patients on our way to the school. By the time I got there at least 200 hundred men, women and children were lined up (I use this term loosely, very loosely) in front of the school. We finally put out things down in a small cement room about 10 x 13 ft. Now mind you, normally when we do clinics at MBH we hand out numbers, we only allow those in to see us who have numbers and we are generally pretty good with crowd control-see the part about handing out numbers in advance and being very firm about only seeing those patients with numbers. All I can say about the crowd in front of the school building was that it was comprised of people desperate for care in an area with one clinic that charges more than they can afford. In other words it was sheer chaos. Think pictures of Michael Jackson concerts in Europe where the people in front are getting trampled and there is not nearly enough security to secure anything. Ok so there were not 10,000 screaming fans but there was definitely more pushing, shoving, throwing children over our barricade into the clinic and yelling than I have ever experienced. Did I mention the term chaos yet?

Inside the ‘school house’ we set up and had volunteers begin to triage the patients as myself and Dr. Ben began to do intakes. I was on his turf that day which meant working more like a M.D. than an N.D. This means no more vitamins, homeopathics, botanicals and other supplements; simply antibiotics, antifungals, anti parasitics  antihistamines, anti-itch cream and cardiac/BP meds. Good thing my med school training covered all of this; I felt ready to work quickly and efficiently with the medications provided. I was excited to see they had Albendazole for each child which is what the Minister of Health is trying to implement in Haiti as the cases of worms here are massive.  We worked for 3 hours, saw 79 patients (one Haitian nurse was also seeing patients) when finally Dr. Ben had to call it to a halt after trying to warn the patients that they needed to move back and to stop pushing or we could no longer provide care. It was too dangerous for the patients to keep working, there was a constant sea of people pushing and shoving outside in the extreme heat. We were having children come in who had been hurt in the crowd, probably getting heat stroke as well as being pushed up against all those bodies in the middle of the day with the sun beating down on you. Dr. Ben said it was the “craziest” clinic he has seen so far here in Haiti. I concur.

As we headed home that day I was thankful for our clinic, our patients and our numbering system. I know there is so much care that needs to be provided here and there are many groups trying to help. I think the next thing that needs to happen is that the short term groups link up with long term groups so patients can continue to receive continuous care. There also needs to be more outreach to rural communities or those who are less able to come to the city for medical care.